RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/day-life-apartheid-nyc-katie-hopkins/

[See Katie Hopkins’ exclusive video report on Apartheid NYC right below this article.]

I’m not quite sure how I thought this trip to New York City would work out. I kind of figured the crazy new rules regarding vaccination passes didn’t apply to me, or somehow that reality would be different to the headlines — stating that you needed to be vaccinated to go into bars, restaurants, and hotels in the city that never sleeps. I have faith in humanity and no fear. I couldn’t believe for a moment this place I used to call home would actually be enforcing the rules fabricated by de Blasio and the drug-pushers in power.

But I was wrong.

Every hotel, bar, and business is pushing this vaccination apartheid. There are signs on every doorway, and just in case you missed those, there are more signs at eye height in the foyers. You may only be inside, sit inside, or dine inside if you are double-jabbed and have a vaccination card and ID to prove it.

Even in the dodgy backstreet Thai kitchens of 9th street where you can reliably get a Pad Thai for $5 are checking papers and policing documents, fearful of being caught by inspectors and closed down.

Wooden shelters and fabricated huts are hastily thrown up onto the sidewalks outside these places — crashing into the gutter alongside the trash and the parked cars. Restaurant owners are scrambling to create some kind of outdoor alternative for the unclean and non-compliant who have failed to get their jabs and are excluded from the privileges accorded to the rest.

I plonk myself down outside the Midtown Bar and Grill and order a large glass of Merlot to try and calm myself from the rage I feel.

I am beyond angry that politicians have been able to exert this power level on the people they are supposed to serve. I am raging for these businesses that have been compelled to post these signs at their doors after two brutal years of lockdowns and staff shortages.

But mostly, I want to scream at the legion of smug diners sitting inside these places. Apparently, they see no problem at all with having to show their papers to eat in a restaurant. They’ve had the jab, and now, they are reaping the benefits, perfectly content that others are excluded because of the personal choices they make.

I ask the waitress how the bathroom situation works. Are the people outside allowed to use a bathroom? Are the unclean masses still allowed the privilege of taking a private pee?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/americans-really-dont-like-this-president/

One wonders if Joe Biden has noticed yet that Americans just don’t seem to like him very much?

Yes, yes, yes, they liked him enough to elect him over Donald Trump. But they did so narrowly, and without delivering the sizable majorities he clearly believes he deserved. And, now that he’s president, they seem deeply, deeply unimpressed.

Per a Quinnipiac poll released today, Biden’s national approval rating is 38 percent. Among independents, it’s 32 percent, with 60 percent disapproving of the job he’s doing. Biden is nine points underwater among Hispanics, he’s six points underwater among women, and he’s polling at only 66 percent among African Americans.

Earlier this year, Biden argued that Americans should ignore Washington, D.C., and look to the country in general when determining whether he was the “uniter” he promised to be:

The White House wants to change how people perceive bipartisanship, arguing that if they put forward proposals that are backed by Republicans and independents, they should be seen as bipartisan even if GOP lawmakers in Washington don’t vote for them.

I think we can dispense with that idea. Biden’s approve-disapprove rating is 4–94 among Republicans, it’s 32–60 among independents, and it’s 80–10 among Democrats. If Americans in 2021 are “united” around anything, it’s that they disfavor Joe Biden.

And how. By a margin of 56–41, Americans say that Biden lacks leadership skills. By a margin of 54–42, Americans say that Biden is incompetent. By a margin of 50–44, Americans say that Biden is dishonest. Worse yet, there’s no issue on which Biden is doing well. His approve–disapprove on COVID-19 is 48–50; on the economy, it’s 39–55; on his leadership of the military, it’s 37–58 . On taxes, 37 percent of Americans approve, while 54 percent disapprove; on foreign policy, it’s 34–58 percent; and on immigration, it’s a startling 25–67 percent. That last number is particularly interesting because, if you look at the cross-tabs, you see that Biden is underwater on immigration amongst Hispanics by 46 points, 23–69.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_war_on_america_by_twisted_logic.html

We are living under a regime that’s increasingly totalitarian.  And it is using an insidious strategy — call it disinformation, propaganda, gaslighting, indoctrination, or outright lying — to achieve the leftists’ political and social goal of a “Great Reset” of America.  The regime’s enforcers, or boosters, are the media, academia, and Big Tech, who together control the narrative with faked statistics, slanted semantics, and endless repetition.  They also deploy the psychological tactics of intimidation, shaming, and canceling.  At the center sits the government, but the chain of command — who dictates to whom — is often unclear.

“Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth” is a principle often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.  In America today, “woke” social justice warriors are using a continuous barrage of lies to achieve their Machiavellian agenda.

Four recent, egregious lies come to mind.  In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a UCLA business school professor who has taught at the institution for forty years, was suspended for refusing a student’s request to provide an easier exam for black students.  Black students, it was propounded, were emotionally distressed after the death of serial felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The email exchange between Klein and the student, which went viral, was deemed “hurtful,” and the professor was unreasonably branded an “insensitive bigot.”  Antonio  Bernardo, the school’s dean, organized a smear campaign against Klein and sought permission to fire him.

Klein stood his ground, saying he was shocked by the student’s request, which he found “deeply patronizing and offensive” to black students.  He also assessed, rightly, that granting the request would violate the California constitution’s prohibition of “race-based preferences in public education.”  But such has been the effect of woke indoctrination that, incomprehensibly, students called for his removal and gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that he be relieved of his teaching duties.  In its eagerness to be seen as woke in the current racially charged atmosphere, UCLA chose to ignore the abject harassment of its professor, sided with the crybullies, and suspended Klein.  Fortunately, an academic senate committee ruled that instructors are entitled to refuse requests to change grading schemes, and Klein was reinstated three weeks later.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/07/biden-to-taxpayers-go-invest-in-yourself/

Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get more arrogant or dishonest, President Joe Biden on Tuesday, visiting the congressional district of one of the House’s less-extreme Democrats, warned that “autocrats” in the world are scrutinizing America for signs of decline on the geopolitical stage, and we therefore must “invest in ourselves” to prove “that American democracy works.”

Translation: spend trillions with a T establishing a new series of cradle-to-grave entitlements that, like our already-existing entitlements, will in short order become politically impossible ever to repeal.

Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moreover, look straight into the TV camera and tell the American people that these unprecedented, astronomical expenditures will cost zero.

This, not Donald Trump placing the spotlight on all-too-real election fraud, is the true “Big Lie.”

No one using a gift card at the store in the weeks after Christmas is a big enough liar or financial illiterate to claim that the spending spree he’s enjoying costs zero. It costs plenty; the point is he’s not paying for it! But shame and economic ignorance are never obstacles for today’s Democrats in pursuit of power over our lives.

We know that middle-class American taxpayers will be suffering the pain of paying for the “$3.5 trillion” that is actually more like $5 trillion, which Democrats themselves know isn’t infrastructure at all, as they claim it to be.

Why else would the bill include $80 billion for the IRS to expand its powers to Orwellian realms and spy on checking and savings accounts where the balances or transactions exceed $600? Are we to believe that in order to steal from the rich and give to Uncle Sam, Robin Hood and his merry band of revenue collectors now need the bank statements of the millions of Americans who can barely pay their monthly bills – so many of whom pathetically voted for Democrats, naively thinking it was in their interest?

The left’s overreach is so glaring that this all may backfire. After all, the two lone Democrats in the Senate with a modicum of fiscal sanity, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom know that supporting the bill as presently constituted spells their own political suicide, have been terrorized by leftist activists – in kayaks on the Potomac River in Manchin’s case, and in a public ladies room stall and a commercial airplane in the case of Sinema.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garlands-federal-offense-department-of-justice-school-board-threats-11633540078?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Is there a culture-war issue that Merrick Garland won’t jump into? We can’t think of one, and now the Attorney General is nosing the Justice Department into debates at local school boards.

His intervention came this week after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to President Biden asking the feds to consider if threats and acts directed at school boards “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

We hadn’t heard that an angry parent is the equivalent of ISIS. But Mr. Garland this week directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to meet with local law enforcement to find ways to address the “disturbing spike” in “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”

The NSBA letter cited various disruptions and incidents. In Illinois a man was arrested after striking a school official escorting him from a meeting. In Michigan a man gave a Nazi salute and shouted “Heil Hitler” in protest of masking requirements. In Virginia a man was arrested and another ticketed for trespassing after a raucous meeting whose subjects included the treatment of transgender students.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-entitlements-of-u-s-decline-joe-biden-europe-11633556687?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Democrats are scrambling to find an argument, any argument, that sells their $5 trillion spending plan to a skeptical public. The latest, and startling, attempt is President Biden’s claim that all of his new entitlements will, well, make America greater.

“To oppose these investments is to be complicit in America’s decline,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday, adding that “other countries are speeding up and America is falling behind.” Got that, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ? You’re complicit in the country’s looming failure.

***

You have to admire the audacity of pitching higher taxes and more social welfare as the path to national revival, especially when the global evidence is the opposite. The result of Mr. Biden’s expanded entitlements is likely to be reduced incentives to work and invest, slower economic growth, lower living standards, and less fiscal space for essential public goods like national defense.

That’s the lesson from Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare states, which Bernie Sanders explicitly pitches as models. Most have older populations than the U.S., but this alone doesn’t account for their lower labor participation rates and much higher structural unemployment. European jobless rates tend to be much higher than in the U.S., especially for the young. In 2019 labor participation was 62.6% in the U.S. versus 49.7% in Italy, 55% in France, 57.7% in Spain, 59.3% in Portugal and 61.3% in Germany.

Europe’s lower rates of labor participation have contributed to slower growth. While the U.S. economy was slow to recover from the 2008-09 recession amid the Obama policy uncertainty, U.S. GDP growth still averaged 2.3% from 2010 to 2019, surpassing Italy (0.27%), Portugal (0.86%), Spain (1.07%), France (1.42%) and Germany (1.97%).

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/biden-ethics-son.html

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

A week earlier, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger published a scrupulously reported book on the Biden family. It makes a compelling case that some of the most explosive emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop were entirely genuine — a claim that Schreckinger confirmed with multiple sources, including a Swedish government agency, and that was never explicitly denied by Hunter himself.

That includes a 2017 email in which one of Hunter’s potential business partners proposed a “provisional agreement” with the now-defunct company CEFC China Energy to share equity percentages in a new venture, with “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Jim Biden is the president’s brother. “The big guy,” according to Tony Bobulinski, a recipient of the email, is Hunter’s father.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a05e044bdd

I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.

As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.

The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.

Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:

CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

How far ago it was when a Democrat President could speak of open markets and of trusting the American people. Fear has become a tool of American politicians, especially those on the left, to help control the people they are supposed to serve. In a recent issue of The Spectator, regarding the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus, Karol Markowicz wrote: “We are in a moment of profound fear in the U.S…We cannot continue to succumb to a fear of life. We must not continue to be scared of each other.” Yet, politicians used fear to place the sick in nursing homes, and to close places of worship, schools and businesses, and to issue mask and vaccine mandates.

As well, fear of climate change infects our youth. Writing in February 2020 in The Washington Post, Jason Plautz wrote: “Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change,” while academics, politicians and certain businesses thrive on this fear. Michael Moore and Al Gore made millions out of scaring people about climate change. Thomas P. Gloria, managing director of Industrial Ecology Solutions and Program Director, Sustainability, Harvard Extension School, wrote in the April 22, 2020, edition of the Harvard Gazette: “My fear is, despite the science and the early warning signals that we bear witness to – record temperatures, 1000-year storms, glacial retreat, coral reefs dying on a continental scale – global society may finally wake up, but it may be too late.”

Fear of expressing non-conventional ideas has become pervasive. Many will not speak out for fear of financial retaliation. Ted Rall, author of The Stringer, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?” A culture that cancels history and opinions is one that denies free speech. How many students fear expressing opinions that depart from a progressive narrative that has become ubiquitous? How many junior executives question their senior managers? Do members of Congress let demands of Party out-weigh their own consciences? Fear of failing grades, loss of job and political retribution are used to suppress speech and control people.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/the-left-can-finally-admit-what-it-wants/

I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather. 

At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it? 

Twenty or 30 years ago, before my generation metastasized, it was tacitly understood on both sides of the political aisle that leftists—mostly Democrats—had to lie about what they wanted to do. They had to pretend, for instance, that they didn’t want to raise taxes. SNL made fun of this in their famous 1988 sketch “Dukakis After Dark”: “Mike, now that it’s all over, you can tell me. You were going to raise taxes, weren’t you?” “You bet I was!”

Leftists likewise had to pretend they liked the military. This led to Dukakis’ disastrous Abrams tank photo op.  

It wasn’t Dukakis’ fault exactly—as “he” says in the SNL sketch, “We represent unpopular, discredited views.” But if only he’d been more fortunate in his timing, and could have waited 20 or 30 years: Precisely those discredited views were being indoctrinated into school children across the country. The children grew up, and the ideas have found new life. 

Walter Mondale’s 1984 pledge to raise taxes helped destroy his presidential campaign. In 2020, Biden’s pledge to do the same went essentially unnoticed—in part because the press, now run by the kids who were in school when Mondale ran, didn’t want to report it. But also because those kids like the idea of higher taxes. In a sense we’ve come full circle. The Left can finally admit in public all the things it used to hide.  

The Left is finally out of the closet.