RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/vermont_once_embraced_eugenics_now_it_embraces_pubertyblockers.html

America is being torn apart by a “scientific” dispute over the appropriateness of hormone-blockers for minor children.  The safety of these drugs is in question, as well as whether children are being fully assessed for mental health issues that may underlie gender dysphoria.  A number of responsible states have initiated legislation to ban their use, most recently joined by Tennessee.  Meanwhile, another group of states are rushing to shield these drug regimens for kids from parental or legal interference.  Vermont, which eagerly embraced eugenics and forced sterilization a century ago, is aggressively creating a modern version of Underground Railroad for people in other states (with no age limits) to freely obtain hormone-meddling “therapies” in the Green Mountains.

Vermont has been a frontrunner in providing abortions through all stages of pregnancy.  Progressives shrieked in feigned panic when Roe v. Wade was overturned, claiming that women’s “rights” to infanticide were thereby threatened — even though Roe acknowledged fetal viability and the existence of a second life meriting legal protections at some stage of development in the womb.  “Women’s rights” became the clarion call in Vermont’s 2022 elections, in which nearly 77% of Vermont voters voted “Yes” to a constitutional amendment (Proposal 5) enshrining abortion ’til birth.

Proposal 5 was also a Trojan horse to etch the “right” to puberty-blockers for children into law, using the vague language “personal reproductive autonomy.”  Having regained a progressive supermajority in the election by this ruse, the Vermont Legislature has wasted no time pushing through novel extremist legislation to codify the practice of administering experimental puberty hormone–blockers to children.  H.89 passed the House on February 10 by a resounding child-mutilating margin of 130-13 and is now in the Vermont Senate.

https://rufo.substack.com/p/biden-creates-a-national-dei-bureaucracy

Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal government.

The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams”; funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations”; and weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

In this video, I explain how Biden’s executive order manipulates language and statistics in order to nationalize the DEI movement, suppress dissent from the new racial orthodoxy, and subvert the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.

Transcript

President Joe Biden is overhauling the entire federal government along the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it seems like nobody has noticed. Last week, he signed another executive order promoting DEI called “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” There was very little news coverage about this, but I think that it is an extremely important development. It has ramifications for almost everything that we’ve been talking about the last few years, and I’d like to go into this in detail to really understand how this DEI ideology works, how it embeds itself in the bureaucracy, and what it means for our country, what it means for our constitution, and what it means for our government.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/another_bad_day_for_the_inflation_reduction_act.html

We are not sure about Senator Manchin’s 2024 U.S. Senate plans. We did hear that Senator Tester of Montana is running for re-election.  In fact, Senator Tester said that he is running because “Montanans need a fighter holding Washington accountable and I’m running to defend our Montana values.”

Well, I hope someone will ask both men about the Inflation Reduction Act in light of the new inflation concerns.  This is from The Wall Street Journal:

This measure of inflation, a favorite of the Federal Reserve, accelerated in January at the fastest monthly pace since June. The PCE index is worth following because it offers a view of price changes from business sources and takes into account the substitution of goods and services in a way the consumer-price index doesn’t.

PCE inflation overall rose 0.6% for the month, up from 0.2% in each of November and December. 

The PCE index over the last 12 months is up 5.4%, which was up slightly from December after several months of decline. Inflation in services drove much of the increase and is up 5.7% since January 2022.

The story here is that inflation is proving stickier than many expected. 

Don’t you hate it when things prove stickier than expected?  I think consumers shopping for food can relate to that.  The Biden administration keeps telling you that inflation is dropping, but the prices of food and lots of other things are not.

The new report means that Chairman Powell may have to tinker with those interest rates again.  The new inflation concerns mean that Mr. Manchin and Mr. Tester will get questions about their votes that made the infamous Inflation Reduction Act possible.  I think a lot of good people in Montana and West Virginia will ask these gentlemen why they voted with Senator Schumer.

https://victorhanson.com/our-neronian-super-bowl-part-two/

The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.

The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?

How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?

Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?

The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.

True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/24/did_us_firms_help_propel_chinas_balloon_fleet_148906.html

Sen. Mark Kelly, who previously served as a decorated space shuttle pilot with NASA, waded into the Chinese spy balloon uproar early this week after keeping publicly mum about it for several weeks.

The Arizona Democrat said it makes no sense for the U.S. military to launch expensive missiles at weather balloons or other benign floating objects. Kelly was referring to a heat-seeking, air-to-air missile used in recent weeks to shoot down several high-flying aerial objects that the administration later suggested likely didn’t pose a threat. Earlier in the month, a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it breached American airspace and floated across the country, setting off a firestorm in Washington.

Kelly, who is set to be inducted into the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame in May, says he’s working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that would communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects.

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military,” Kelly, who was tapped to chair a Senate Armed Services subcommittee amid the balloon controversy, told the Associated Press.

Sen. John Tester, a Montana Democrat who is heading up the investigation into how a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, including some in his state, was more forceful.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may have caused,” Tester told Fox News.

China’s high-altitude spy balloon controversy appears to have taken most Washington lawmakers and the intelligence community by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have. China’s interest in these stratospheric dirigibles has been an open secret for nearly a decade.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/24/amtrak-joe-couldnt-be-bothered-to-visit-a-train-wreck/

A freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, three weeks ago. Residents were ordered to evacuate and the cargo of toxic chemicals from five tanker cars was eventually released and set on fire. So far, Joe Biden hasn’t visited the scene, as is tradition for presidents when large-scale disasters strike. Instead, Biden officials have blamed Donald Trump, who hasn’t been president in more than two years, for the wreck. But even some media outlets are admitting it wasn’t his fault.

Official word from the White House accuses “congressional Republicans and former Trump administration officials” for selling out “to rail industry lobbyists when they dismantled the Obama-Biden rail safety protections as well as EPA powers to rapidly contain spills.” The administration believes Trump, who beat Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is utterly useless) to the site, and GOP lawmakers, owe “East Palestine an apology.” 

“Congressional Republicans laid the groundwork for the Trump administration to tear up requirements for more effective train brakes,” Andrew Bates, a deputy White House press secretary, ranted on Wednesday, “and last year most House Republicans wanted to defund our ability to protect drinking water.”

That last point must really eat at the White House. Bates issued the statement on the same day Trump showed up with 13 pallets of bottled water, nine of which he donated (and delivered by two moving companies based in Red States), for the East Palestine residents who are understandably fearful of their water supply. Seems the former president was doing the work of the federal agency that has “emergency management” in its name but had not arrived in the city until this past weekend.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/22/trump-grand-juror-goes-on-bizarre-media-blitz-says-multiple-indictments-recommended/

Before any indictments have been handed down, the foreman of the grand jury investigating election interference by former President Donald Trump and his allies in Georgia, is making the rounds in the media to discuss what was decided.

A special grand jury has recommended multiple indictments, according to the jury’s foreman, Emily Kohrs, 30, who appeared on CNN and MSNBC on Tuesday to talk about the case. Kohrs, an apparent Wicca enthusiast, has also spoken with The Associated Press, The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Can you imagine doing this for eight months and not coming out with a whole list” of recommended indictments, Kohrs told CNN. “It’s not a short list. It’s not.” The grand jury, according to Kohrs focused on Trump’s infamous phone call with Secretary Raffensperger.

“There may be some names on that list that you wouldn’t expect. But the big name that everyone keeps asking me about—I don’t think you will be shocked,” she said.

When asked specifically whether the jurors had recommended indicting Trump, Kohrs said, “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” adding “it is not going to be some giant plot twist. You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”

Kohrs said she couldn’t remember exactly how many indictments the special grand jury had recommended, but indicated that it would be more than twelve.

Asked by CNN’s Kate Bolduan whether the number of people was “more than a dozen,” Kohrs replied: “I believe so. That’s probably a good assumption.”

Portions of the grand jury’s final report, released last week, made it clear that the grand jury believed perjury charges were warranted for some witnesses. The foreperson’s identity was first revealed by The Associated Press. And earlier on Tuesday, Kohrs told The New York Times that the grand jury recommended multiple indictments, though she didn’t provide names.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/22/the-ukraine-wars-prelude-to-what/

The Ukraine mess is daily looking more like the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, a meat grinder that took 500,000 lives. That three-year conflict became a savage proxy war and prelude for the belligerents of World War II.

The Ukraine battlefield is proving a similar laboratory of death. New lethal weaponry and tactics are introduced, modified—and always improved—from drones to guided missiles to internet-fed artillery. 

Likewise, a similar pre-global war lineup of the eventual adversaries is emerging in preview of a much larger, much scarier war to come.

The first mission of Ukraine, the aggrieved victim of a peremptory Russian attack, was simple survival. 

But now that it has been armed to the teeth and its soldiers proved far more capable and heroic than Putin’s once-feared Russia, Kyiv now seeks to push back Russians to their 2014 Ukrainian acquired borders.

Next President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced that the third stage will be to eject every Russian from 2013 Ukraine. He promises to reabsorb both the Crimea and the Donbas.

That is an ambitious goal that might require preemptive attacks inside Russia and on the Black Sea.

To accomplish the last two missions, Zelenskyy needs a blank check of support from a United States that can neither control its own borders nor maintain its critical infrastructure and is $33 trillion in debt.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/taking_back_america.html

As I travel, I constantly see tattered American flags blowing in the wind.  They are a metaphor for the state of the Union. It is emblematic of how our country is being hollowed out. We have a Manchurian leader who is gutting us of our rights.  The latest assault is Biden’s determination to put us under the domination of the World Health Organization, who will determine our health care.

Despite widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the COVID pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra joined with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in September 2022 to announce ‘the U.S.-WHO Strategic Dialogue.’ Together, they developed a ‘platform to maximize the longstanding U.S. government-WHO partnership, and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people.’

What could possibly go wrong with America ceding its G-d given rights to an organization that could set up a “medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros” who could “issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians?”

Consider that COVID dictators continue to look for a way out after “draconian Covid measures ruined the lives of millions of lower- and middle-class Americans while lining the pockets of the liberal cabal.”

Cultural Marxism continues to degrade every facet of our country.

With the end of the Cold War, many Americans justifiably believed communism had been defeated.  But American Marxists have gained more influence than ever before.  Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, these cultural Marxists want to distort America’s history and dismantle its very foundations.

Everywhere we turn, the social justice warriors have invaded.  Endless ethics training courses are mandated in order for colleges to receive federal funding. These courses are Orwell’s nightmare of debasing language, gaslighting, and weakening common sense.