RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/23/when-will-america-reach-peak-insanity/

It seems roughly half of the country is suffering from mass delusions. Either that or there is a willful effort to ignore the truth and spread lies for political reasons. Neither scenario bodes well for the country.

Our American sensibilities are assaulted on a daily basis with claims that are widely accepted to be true and righteous even though they’re demonstrably false and malign. The falsehoods, exaggerations, and prevarications by omission are tearing at the fabric of the great American experiment in liberty. Which is exactly what they are designed to do.

Consider the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted (justly) last week of the homicide and reckless endangerment charges that should have never been brought against him. Not only was the prosecution malicious (for which the prosecutors should be sued), the web of lies that corrupted the entire case were in service of a nefarious political agenda.

Rittenhouse did not kill two black men and wound another, as some media outlets claimed. The men he shot in self-defense were white. Nor could it be said the men were mere protesters, as so many asserted.

Rittenhouse was also called a white supremacist, even by I’ll-bring-the-country-together candidate Jeo Biden, though there’s no evidence that he is. It simply fit the narrative and that was good enough.

These examples are but surface coverage of the untruths politicians, the media and half-wit celebrities spread about Rittenhouse, because they saw the episode, from the self-defense shootings to the trial, as an opportunity to further demonize firearms and to make the streets safe for the “right” kind of protesting, which to the sane and decent among us is known as rioting by the left.

Meanwhile, the global warming lunacy continues to run free. No longer are the green shirts satisfied with replacing gasoline and diesel automobiles with electric cars, they want to get rid of cars altogether.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-waukesha-rampage-darrell-brooks-wisconsin-john-chisholm-11637622563?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

We’ll learn more in the coming days about the man who police say drove a red SUV through a crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday, killing five and wounding at least 48. But based on what we already know, the awful rampage is likely to trigger a debate about rising crime and the progressive drive for bail reform and reduced incarceration.

Police say 39-year-old Darrell Brooks faces five counts of intentional homicide, and more lives are in jeopardy in area hospitals. The dead include members of the Dancing Grannies, a fixture at the annual parade and other Milwaukee-area events. Eighteen children were admitted to a local children’s hospital and trauma center, including 10 in intensive care.

Mr. Brooks has a long rap sheet, and the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office said Monday he had been out on a $1,000 bond after he allegedly tried to hit the mother of his child with his vehicle. He was arrested the same day and charged with obstructing an officer, endangering public safety, disorderly conduct, jumping bail and battery. Why was someone with that violent history released on such a minor bond?

The D.A.’s office said it is conducting an internal review of the bail decision, which sounds like ex post self-protection. “The state’s bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and pending charges against Mr. Brooks,” said the D.A.’s office in a statement. The Milwaukee County D.A is John Chisholm, a Democrat who readers may recall for his office’s unjustified pursuit of donors to former Gov. Scott Walker’s campaigns.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-and-american-gratitude-11637617891?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“We have nothing to announce at this time,” says White House National Security Council assistant press secretary Patrick Evans via email today on the potential scheduling of a Medal of Honor ceremony for American hero Alwyn Cashe. This Thanksgiving week President Joe Biden should express the thanks of a grateful nation and honor the memory of the courageous Cashe.

A year ago this column noted the amazing sacrifices Cashe made for his fellow soldiers while sustaining fatal burns in Iraq in 2005. Even while on fire, he pulled his wounded comrades out of a Bradley fighting vehicle under furious attack.

Once the Pentagon had learned the full story of his selfless actions, both houses of Congress acted by unanimous consent last year to make Cashe eligible for the Medal of Honor, which normally must be awarded within five years of the actions giving rise to the award. Then-President Donald Trump signed the law making Cashe eligible and the presentation was expected this year.

But now it’s late November and for some reason the expected presidential action still hasn’t occurred. Last month the Orlando Sentinel’s editorial board wrote:

The 16th anniversary of Alwyn Cashe’s heroism in Iraq came and went on Sunday… And yet, we’re still waiting for the Biden administration to get off its rear end and schedule a ceremony finally granting Cashe the honor he earned with his life.
… Raised in Seminole County, Cashe went straight from Oviedo High School to the U.S. Army in 1988. He served in the Gulf War and then in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/suspect-in-waukesha-christmas-parade-attack-identified/

A black male with a lengthy criminal rap sheet is in police custody in Waukesha, Wisconsin,  after an SUV plowed into Christmas parade on Sunday, resulting in multiple fatalities, and more than 20 people injured.

At least eleven adults and twelve children were transported to six area hospitals following the horrific vehicular attack.

According to Sandra Peterson, the communication director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee,  a Catholic priest, multiple parishioners and Waukesha Catholic school children, were among the injured.

“Please join us in prayer for all those involved, their families, and those who are traumatized from witnessing the horrible scene,” Peterson said in a statement.

The suspect, Darrell E. Brooks, 39, is a registered sex offender, who was arrested several weeks ago for multiple felonies and misdemeanors, including domestic abuse, resisting or obstructing an officer, jumping bail, disorderly conduct, and battery, according to Wisconsin Circuit Court records.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/

Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?

Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?

In archetypical “states’ rights” fashion, blue-state “sanctuary cities” are as defiant of the federal government as the Old South was when it claimed immunity from federal jurisdiction—all the way from the nullification crisis of 1830-1833 to George Wallace in 1963 blocking the door at the University of Alabama.

Ask yourself: in the decades following the conclusion of the Civil War in April 1865, how might the reunited American public have answered the following hypothetical questions:

One-hundred-fifty-six years from now, in the year 2021, where in the United States will Americans most likely discriminate on the basis of race?

Where will citizens squabble over the racial percentages of ancestral bloodlines, and schools admit or reject students in part on the DNA of an applicant?

Where will free speech and expression become most endangered?

Where will states’ rights boosters deny federal officers the right to enforce federal law?

Where will the major cities be the most unsafe and the middle classes the most embattled? And from which regions of the country will people flee, and to which will they migrate?

Of course, in the century-and-a-half since the end of the Civil War, we have become in a certain sense a homogenizing country. Gender studies programs at, say, the University of Texas are not that much different from those at Yale. The same types of homeless are found in downtown Atlanta as well as in San Francisco.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/did-merrick-garland-commit-perjury/

A ttorney General Merrick Garland has been shamefully disingenuous, with the public and Congress, regarding his mobilization of the FBI — under the guise of a nonexistent spate of violent attacks on public-school administrators — to harass and intimidate parents who are protesting against progressive indoctrination of their children. Garland’s October 4 memo on this subject was obviously the result of a Biden administration political gambit, in which the White House recruited progressive operatives of a school-board association to collaborate on a letter to the president, almost immediately after which Garland issued the memo that directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys’ offices to conduct investigations the federal government has no business conducting.

But did Garland go beyond the usual bobbing and weaving when confronted by Congress on the Biden administration’s threats? Did he commit perjury when he insisted that the government has not and would not employ anti-terrorism investigative measures against America’s parents?

Well, it depends on the meaning of “threat tag.”

In a letter to the attorney general on Tuesday, Congressman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, recounts Garland’s congressional testimony to the effect that the Justice Department and the FBI were not — as Jordan put it — “using counterterrorism statutes and resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings.” Jordan then quotes Garland’s assertion that he could not “imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor . . . a circumstance where they would be labeled domestic terrorists.”

By alluding to the Patriot Act here, the attorney general was referring to a set of investigative techniques that the FBI and Justice Department attorneys are permitted to use in counterterrorism investigations. Initially enacted 20 years ago, right after the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act empowers the FBI’s national-security agents to use many of the same tools that have long been available to the bureau’s criminal investigators — on analogous terms, which reflect that the principal task of the FBI’s National Security Branch (which used to be referred to as its Foreign Counterintelligence Division) is to safeguard the nation from the plots and machinations of terrorists and hostile foreign agents, not to investigate and prosecute criminal offenses.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/are-democrats-digging-their-own-grave-bruce-thornton/

President Biden’s approval numbers continue to drop. Republicans are up ten points in the generic ballot for the 2022 midterms. Blue Virginia elected a Republican governor, defeating a pillar of the party since the Clinton administration. Inflation is reaching record highs, as are gasoline prices. Meanwhile  Xi, Putin, and Khamenei are geopolitically partying like it’s 1979.

Yet the progressive Dems and their media PR flaks keep promoting policies and indulging in political antics guaranteed to alienate more and more voters. A year out from the midterm elections, a party with razor-thin margins of control in the House and Senate seem headed for a massive repudiation.

Their most recent example of political myopia is the grotesque lies and hysteria over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and acquittal. As the New York Post’s Miranda Devine writes, “Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.”

So it happened that a working-class teenager offering medical aid and protecting a business in his community during a riot, and who was attacked by three white men, including two convicted felons, was transformed into a “white supremacist” and a lawless, Trumpkin “vigilante” who “crossed state lines” with an illegal “assault rifle” in order to stalk and murder Black Live Matter activists “peacefully protesting” against extrajudicial police murders of black man (who’s still alive). A couple of “woke” journalists even turned the slain white thugs into innocent blacks.

As Mary McCarthy said of lefty Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, every word of the narrative is a lie, including “the” and “and.” It’s a textbook example of Hitler’s “big lie,” one so “colossal,” Hitler wrote, that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Over the last five years the Dems have had some success with this propaganda tactic. But the Biden administration’s serial failures, and the arrogant excesses of the “woke” racial tribunes, have soured voters who, as the Virginia gubernatorial race shows, are sick of the “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory smears, which are genuine racist nonsense. And parents––approaching two years of unscientific, politicized, disruptive covid policies like remote teaching and masks imposed on their children––aren’t happy about a racist, divisive curriculum piled on to all that pedagogical malfeasance.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/21/dr_scott_atlas_the_birx-fauci_lockdowns_failed_to_stop_the_pandemic.html

Author of “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” Dr. Scott Atlas, joined “Sunday Morning Futures” with FNC’s Maria Bartiromo to talk about how the government has politicized science about Covid-19.

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: The data is the data. And the data is being denied by the lockdowners. The data shows the following. Bjornskov’s study of 24 European countries, the lockdowns did not reduce the deaths during the pandemic. That was a spring 2021 study.

A January 2021 study from Stanford’s Bendavid and colleagues, lockdowns failed to stop the spread of the infection. In fact, Ioannidis, one of the authors, said it was — quote — “pro-contagion,” increasing infections.

And the most important study was National Bureau of Economic Research by RAND in June this year. Everyone should look at it, because they showed analysis of 43 countries and all the states that lockdowns increased the excess deaths during the pandemic. Earlier lockdowns increased the deaths during the pandemic.

And when lockdowns were instilled, deaths were coming down. And the deaths started increasing when the lockdowns were implemented. So the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, which was the advice of the task force the entire year, failed to stop the spread of the infection. They failed to stop the dying. And they destroyed millions and millions of people, particularly low-income families.

BARTIROMO: Yes, I want to ask you about the Birx-Fauci lockdown, because, today, we have the FDA authorizing now booster shots for everybody, all adults.

Pfizer and Moderna are going to make a combined $93 billion in sales on this in the coming years on vaccines. What is going on here? Is this about money? Your thoughts on the FDA asking a federal judge to give it 55 years to wait for all data, release final data on the Pfizer vaccine?

ATLAS: Yes, I mean, there are so many problems with this.

BARTIROMO: Fifty-five years.

ATLAS: And the science — yes. And on the science side alone, boosters to be indicated for people who are, for example, low-income groups like children, healthy children have extremely low risk from COVID, period. That’s been known for more than a year-and-a-half.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kamikaze-democrats-nancy-pelosi-joe-biden-build-back-better-house-welfare-2022-11637362201?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal dominated the weekend news, but the more significant story for the long run was House passage Friday of the multi-trillion-dollar tax, climate and entitlement spending bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi marched her majority off a cliff in 2010 with votes on ObamaCare, and now she has done it again.

The Speaker muscled the bill through on a 220-213 vote. No Republicans voted aye, and Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the sole Democratic dissenter. Other swing-district Democrats had made a show of demanding concessions and a bill that “paid for itself,” but in the end the bill didn’t pay for itself even by the rigged rules of the Congressional Budget Office. But they still rolled over, as they always do when Mrs. Pelosi gives the order.

***

The 81-year-old Mrs. Pelosi is almost certainly retiring after this Congress, and this vote is a legacy project for her. But her younger Members will have much to explain in 2022 as they defend this gargantuan, destructive and unnecessary bill.

There’s the immigration provision that would give 6.5 million or so illegal migrants who have been in the country since 2011 a 10-year right to work in the U.S. This will probably be stripped from the bill in the Senate, but House Members will be on record for legalizing millions of migrants even as the border has become a lawless mess. The political effect will be to empower GOP restrictionists.

Then there’s the $8 billion methane “fee” that is in effect a tax on natural gas production and thus on consumer energy prices. The American Gas Association estimates this could raise the average family’s natural gas bill by 17%, so this is also a violation of President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year.

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.