RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-war-must-go-on-11625608694?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I happened to mention the phrase “culture war” in a 1996 conversation with Irving Kristol, who was a contributor to these pages and always a penetrating observer of contemporary American life. “The culture war is over,” Irving said, then paused and added: “We lost.” Alive today, Irving would have been sadly reaffirmed in his declaration, surprised perhaps only at the extent of the loss and the cost it has entailed.

His “we” would include those people who believe in the rewards owed to effort and merit, the value of tradition, and the crucial significance of liberty. “We” would distinctly not include those who believe in the importance of spreading “diversity,” “inclusion” and “equity” as conceived by present-day universities. Nor would it include those whose sense of virtue derives from their putative hunger for social justice and their willingness to make severe judgments of others based on lapses from political correctness. These people are “they,” the woke, who have, as Kristol had it, won the culture war.

The extent of the woke victory is perhaps best demonstrated by the long list of cultural institutions they have captured and now control. Two of the country’s important newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unashamedly woke. The New Yorker and the Atlantic have ceased to be general-interest magazines and are now specific-interest publications—that interest being the spread of woke ideas. The major television networks early fell in line without a fight.

Universities, in their humanities and social-sciences divisions, are not merely devoted to the propagation of woke ideas but initiate most of them. In turning away from the ideals of authority and objectivity in favor of clearly partisan views, these institutions have lost their former prestige yet are apparently sustained by the confidence that preaching woke doctrine is a higher calling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-biden-and-gas-prices-11625611235?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As cognitive dissonance goes, this is a classic. President Biden’s explicit policy goal is to reduce U.S. oil and gas production, limiting the global supply of fossil fuels in the name of fighting climate change. Yet his Administration is now imploring the OPEC oil cartel to pump more oil so U.S. gasoline prices don’t rise more than they already have on Mr. Biden’s watch.

Oil prices climbed to a six-year high on Tuesday after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia failed to agree on increasing production quotas. Last spring OPEC slashed production quotas after crude prices plunged to $20 per barrel amid economic lockdowns and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

But energy demand has snapped back in much of the world as Covid-19 vaccines roll out, governments ease lockdowns, and freight shipments surge. U.S. petroleum consumption is now roughly where it was at this time in 2019. OPEC estimates that oil demand in industrialized countries will increase by 2.7 million barrels a day this year.

In early June OPEC modestly raised production quotas, but demand is still rebounding faster than supply. The upshot is that crude prices are averaging around $74 a barrel, up 45% or so this year. OPEC countries naturally want to take advantage of the pandemic recovery to boost production and generate more petrodollars to fund their governments.

But a squabble between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over quotas is blocking an agreement, sending U.S. gasoline prices to a near seven-year high. Enter the Biden Administration. A White House spokesperson on Monday said it is urging OPEC and its allies to quickly come up with a compromise “that will allow proposed production increases to move forward.”

The Administration is worried that higher gas prices could undermine Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and spending plans. Republicans have been linking his veto of the Keystone XL pipeline with higher gas prices. The two aren’t directly related. But no Keystone does mean that more crude from Canada and the northern Bakken Shale will have to move by rail to U.S. refiners.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/april-powers-condemned-jew-hate-then?token=e

I don’t remember when I first came across Kat Rosenfield’s byline, but I can tell you that for years now I’ve read everything she writes. Her bailiwick is our culture, particularly the strange corners of it that tend to go overlooked by everyone else.

Exhibit A is her ongoing, insightful coverage of the mad world of Young Adult fiction and the moral panics that regularly tend to convulse that industry.

Last week that beat converged with the urgent story of rising Jew-hate in America when a black, Jewish diversity chief named April Powers lost her job in children’s publishing for condemning antisemitism. (You read that right.)

When I came across the story, I immediately reached out to Kat to ask her what it said about the state of the publishing world and, more, what it revealed about how high-minded ideals like intersectionality actually operate in practice.

— BW

On first viewing, it looked like a Tik-Tok riff on The Purge: a caravan of cars rolls down La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. The passengers — young men in keffiyehs, some draped to mask their faces — stand and shout through sunroofs and windows. The cars honk incessantly. In the back of a slow-moving Jeep, one man waves a billboard-sized Palestinian flag while another shouts through a megaphone: “Israel kills women and children every day!” His companions jeer: “Yeah! Fuck you!”

The next video shows the same men on the sidewalk, shouting and advancing on another man in a grey shirt who’s trying to fend them off with a metal pedestal. In the next: The man in grey is lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position. They punch him, kick him, claw at him.

The last video clip of the evening’s events shows the same sidewalk, now crowded with police. “They’re apparently going around the city, asking who’s Jewish, and beating them up,” says the unseen videographer. “This is America, guys.”

These clips were shot in late May, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas, a month in which there were dozens of similar attacks on Jews and Jewish spaces across America. It was also a moment when corporations and politicians —  many of whom had eagerly released statements unequivocally condemning the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes the previous month, or supporting Black Lives Matter the previous year — suddenly lost their nerve when it came to denouncing violence against minorities.

Those that did speak out against Jew-hate, including high-profile progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ayanna Pressley, tended to speak out against “antisemitism and” — as in, antisemitism and Islamophobia, or antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry. (Tablet’s Noam Blum documented the trend here.)

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/05/20-questions-for-nancy-pelosi-about-january-6/

No one has milked the events of January 6 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). She set the official narrative early and often, a storyline her scribes in the news media have dutifully repeated without question or scrutiny.

“[Y]esterday, the president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America, the gleeful desecration of the U.S. Capitol, which is the temple of our American democracy,” Pelosi lamented in a hyperdramatic press conference the day after the raucous protest. She accused President Trump of “sedition” and urged his cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him just two weeks before he officially left the White House.

Nearly every word in her opening statement that day is untrue. The president didn’t “incite” the violence; it was not an insurrection, armed or otherwise, and the only person who used a firearm was a still-unidentified Capitol police officer who killed an unarmed female veteran.

Aside from a few smashed windows, no one gleefully desecrated property—one could convincingly make the argument that the daily presence of lawmakers such as Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), among others represents the true desecration of the property—and America isn’t supposed to believe in sacred “temples” of governmental power. It’s also the same place where Democrats plotted for four years to “attack our democracy” by attempting to remove the duly-elected president of the United States.

To the contrary, buildings paid for by taxpayers to conduct the official business of taxpayer-funded employees once considered public servants but who now consider their taxpaying constituents the servants to their heavy-handed mastery is the ideal location to rise up against the U.S. government. 

It has always been this way. For example, it was just fine when thousands of hysterical protesters occupied the Hart Senate Office building and stalked U.S. senators in 2018 to try to stop the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, screaming from the Senate gallery then pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court in an effort to disrupt his swearing-in ceremony. An MSNBC reporter at the time called the chaos “an extraordinary moment,” not an “insurrection.”

It also was totally cool when thousands of climate activists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), occupied Pelosi’s office that same year to demand action on the environment. Pelosi didn’t scold those activists for desecrating the temple of democracy; she quickly acquiesced to their public pressure campaign.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/americas-centers-for-disease-confusion/

Public-health officials have botched their pandemic response and messaging nearly every step of the way.

America’s vaccination campaign is stalling. In late June, pharmacists and other providers were administering roughly 800,000 shots a day — down 80 percent from a peak of more than 4.6 million in mid April.

Because of this precipitous decline, the Biden administration recently admitted it would miss its self-imposed goal of vaccinating at least 70 percent of American adults by Independence Day. So far, only 66 percent have gotten the jab.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deserve much of the blame for plummeting vaccination rates. Public-health officials have botched their pandemic response and messaging nearly every step of the way — inadvertently stoking skepticism of the vaccines.

Take the CDC’s worst mistake: its decision, in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration, to pause the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for ten days because of a risk of blood clots. The risk ended up being less than one in a million.

That overreaction triggered an immediate drop in public trust in the vaccine. Immediately after the CDC advised halting the J&J shot, the number of daily first doses of all vaccines administered plummeted by some 40 percent compared with weeks earlier.

Recent data have confirmed just how damaging that choice was. According to recent polling, more than 40 percent of unvaccinated Americans say that their biggest concern is that the J&J shot causes blood clots. More than one-quarter believe that every vaccine causes blood clots.

This poor decision-making has been the norm for the CDC since the beginning of the pandemic. The agency’s guidance seems to have been motivated more by armchair psychology than by hard data.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/06/how-much-longer-will-july-4-be-a-holiday/

Though it became a federal holiday only in 1941, Americans have been celebrating Independence Day since the colonies broke away from the British crown. Today, a core of extremists wants to erase our history and at the same time fix it in the public’s mind that this country is illegitimate due to a racist past and present, its colonial foundation, and capitalist system of exploitation. This leaves us to wonder how many more glorious Fourths we have left.

As we noted on Monday, most of us consider ourselves to be either “extremely” (44%) or “very” (23%) proud to be Americans. A mere 6% of the country said it was not proud to be an American.

Good news, no? But just below the surface, the numbers from our I&I/TIPP poll are alarming.

Only 36% of those from 18 to 24, the future of this country, said they were proud to be Americans. Sixty-four percent of Democrats, who hold majorities in the White House and U.S. House, share power in the Senate, and truly dominate the media, and the entertainment industry and culture, say they’re proud to be Americans. This isn’t disturbing, but it doesn’t inspire confidence, since 85% of Republicans hold the same view. That’s a significant divide.

There’s also a sizable gap between the 18-24 group and older Americans. Six in 10 (59%) of those from 25 to 44 say they’re proud of their American heritage, while 75% in the 45-64 group feel the same. Nearly nine in 10 (86%) over 65 are proud to be Americans. 

The lack of respect for our earned liberty among young adults is particularly concerning in light of what is clearly a concerted effort to delegitimize America and cast it as a systemically racist, oppressive, violent, and imperialist regime. Consider what we’ve seen and heard just in recent days:

The day before the Fourth, the New York Times, overflowing with politicized stories and opinion pieces it knows its readers are hungry for, published an article headlined “A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite.”
National Geographic decided Saturday was a good day to plant the idea in our collective consciousness that fireworks are racist.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jul/5/divisive-critical-race-theory-spits-on-the-civil-r/

The essence of critical race theory would teach my three bi-racial children that I, their Black father, am oppressed by America’s history of White supremacy and that their mother, my wife, is my oppressor. 

But, what does that mean for my children? Does half of them qualify as oppressed, and the other half count as the oppressor? Unfortunately, the jury is still out on answering these obscure questions. 

Critical race theory is divisive at its core. This movement to indoctrinate our children is the definition of reverse racism and spits in the face of the Civil Rights Movement led by American heroes such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those proposing this wicked curriculum would like to live in an America where every American is judged based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, which, if I remember my history correctly, is the complete opposite of the teachings of Dr. King and decades of civil rights progress and commitment to creating a more perfect union. Today, radical leftists are upending this longstanding American virtue to push this un-American and divisive agenda. 

If the issue were that American schools aren’t teaching the complete and accurate history to our school children, then I’d agree wholeheartedly, but that is not what CRT peddlers are saying. The Marxist race hustlers and charlatans at the New York Times and in the Democrat Party aren’t in the business of pushing for equity; they are in the business of division. The truth is neither side should advocate for the cherry-picking of American history — neither for nor against our country. Instead, we need a balanced scale that accurately depicts our past, the good, bad, and ugly, that also rightly points out the tremendous progress of our nation. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/7_4_2021_23_7.html

Daily the Marxists/Leftists/Communists among us infiltrate every aspect of our society.  Consequently,  “the individual shrinks in proportion as the state grows” yet the Left continues to work towards an alleged utopia even though “this ‘ideal society’ would be the graveyard of human greatness.” 

Biden and Harris speak as if  “confused ideas and muddy ponds appear deep” when, in fact, they are empty rhetoric. As Nicolas Gomez Davila pointed out “stupidity is the mother of revolutionary atrocities; savageness is only the godmother” and  “the greatest modern error is not to proclaim that God died, but to believe that the devil has died.”

The true sadness is that “violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization.  Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.”  Hence, literature, history, statues, children’s books, humor, film, art and music are now under attack by those whose only aim is the total evisceration of America and her exceptional values.

Consequently, in the lunacy of wokeness,  how long will it be before Winslow Homer’s images of blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction years come under attack?  After all, Winslow Homer was a white man who dared to paint black figures during this tumultuous time period.

According to the exhibition text titled Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years by Peter H. Wood and Karen C.C. Dalton, “[W]hen Winslow Homer displayed ‘The Bright Side in New York City’ in April 1865 — only days after Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s death — black persons were still not allowed to enter the galleries of the National Academy of Design.”  Clearly this was racism in full bloom and it would be a “full century before art depicting black people would appear on the walls of museums.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/wi_spa_ground_zero_in_the_gender_wars.html

The Wi Spa is an upscale Korean-style health club that proudly publicizes its recognition in 2010 as the “Best Family Fun Spa in Los Angeles.”  Just a mile from Koreatown, the facility offers hot and cold baths, “progressive” sauna rooms, massages, body scrubs, and facials in an expansive space that includes a fitness center, restaurant, and kids’ zone. No clothing is permitted — not even bathing suits — and the multilevel building has separate floors for men and women.

Last week, there was an uproar at the spa when, in all his manly glory, a biological male self-identifying as a female paraded naked in front of girls and women in the designated women’s area. Several female patrons were alarmed and offended.

A video viewed by millions on social media shows a vociferous customer confronting the front desk staff and clarifying the issue in no uncertain terms: “I just want to be clear with you,” she is heard saying. “It’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section, show his p***s around other women, young little girls, underage. Your spa, Wi Spa, condoned that.  Is that what you’re saying?” A staff member is heard responding that, despite customers’ objections, the man would be allowed to remain on the women’s floor based on his “sexual orientation.” (What was probably meant was “gender identification.”) Several customers demanded refunds and left the spa in horror and disgust. An Instagram post featuring the video encouraged people to call and complain and suggested a boycott of the Wi Spa.

In saner times — before the two preponderant biological sexes, male and female, were replaced by 72 genders — this egregious incident would have been prosecuted as indecent exposure. Not anymore. When I called the spa to make an appointment for myself and “my eight-year-old daughter,” a staffer categorically told me that even if an individual physically presents as a male with intact genitalia but states he is a woman, the spa would be required to admit him to the women’s facilities despite the presence of little girls there.

Wi Spa staff defended their decision, citing California Civil Code 51(b), which states that “All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” The statute does not specifically mention “gender identity,” but court cases have led to judgments that the delineated categories are “illustrative, not restrictive” and that other classifications would be protected.