RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-functional-america-wants/

The United States is still rich enough to meet higher-order needs and call them entitlements. The decades-long response to race, class and gender proves the point. Americans can fixate on respect, status, self-esteem, hurt feelings and positive recognition because the essentials just happen.

Potable water, traffic lights, microwave ovens and freedom from fear. They are there, like magic. Because all Americans are fed, reasonably policed and more civil than not — this point cannot be overstressed — authorities can sidestep policy basics and empirical findings.

The radical left evidently wishes to dismantle much of what makes this plenty possible — and what many rely on for survival — in the name of social justice. Functional America notices. Yet any rebuke to equity is likely to trigger renewed disorder of the kind condoned by blasé blue-state officials and the Democratic Party in 2020. The state’s clients and their paid handlers intend to keep a catastrophic tribute system and flow of public resources intact, and in many states and localities have the political power to do so.

For seventy-five years, US wealth and surpluses have allowed the expansion of a welfare state that provides vital support — food, medical care, housing, utilities and, in some cases, spending cash — to perhaps 20 percent of the population. These do not include the unemployed or Social Security and Medicare recipients.

Clients of the state include indigent single mothers whose children are neglected. The fathers are elsewhere. Yet their hardship still compares well with global poverty. America’s welfare class possesses cars, cable televisions and air conditioning. But basic needs like safety, love and trust that governments cannot conjure go missing. So the charity and benevolence are not working. They are instead producing monsters like Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha parade killer, and the shock troops of the radical left.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/150045/

The first time Victoria White visited the nation’s capital was on January 6, 2021. Listening to President Trump’s speech—with her teen daughter and three friends alongside her—would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, White thought.

Instead, the day turned into a personal nightmare with real-time flashbacks to her years as a victim of domestic abuse.

White, a mother of four, recounted to me this week by phone in horrifying and heartbreaking detail how at least two D.C. Metropolitan police officers viciously assaulted her inside a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building on January 6. Fierce battles between police and protesters took place inside the tunnel, which leads to a set of doors that allows access to the building. It is the location where Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia, died.

Amid video evidence, court filings, and firsthand witness accounts, new questions have emerged about the exact cause of Boyland’s death. A report issued by the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office in April claimed Boyland, a recovering addict, died of an accidental drug overdose. But others in the vicinity of Boyland when she lost consciousness insist her death was caused by law enforcement officers, who deployed a toxic chemical spray and, in some cases, used metal sticks, riot shields, and their own fists against Trump supporters.

White, 39, found herself in the tunnel near Boyland—and her harrowing account describes nothing short of criminal misconduct by still-unidentified members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. Further, her experience bolsters allegations that police contributed or directly caused the death of a second unarmed female Trump supporter on January 6.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, White traveled from her home to Washington, D.C. to hear President Trump’s speech and protest the results of the rigged 2020 presidential election. A resident of Rochester, Minnesota, White, her daughter, and friends took turns driving so they would arrive in Washington on time. They stayed at the home of one of her friend’s parents in suburban Virginia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/hillary_clinton_reminds_us_what_an_awful_president_she_would_have_been.html

Yes, Joe Biden is far and away the worst president in the history of the United States. However, the four-year Trump interlude between Obama and Biden gave the U.S. at least a little resiliency to stand against Biden’s hard-left administration. Imagine how much worse things would have been if Hillary had immediately stepped into Obama’s shoes. America wouldn’t have stood a chance. And lest you forget just what a horrible human being Hillary was, she just gave us a reminder as she spoke with Today’s Willie Geist about her decision to read her “victory speech” aloud for a MasterClass.

A snippet of her reading the speech made headlines because Hillary started to cry when she got to the part in the speech that saw her imagining telling her long-deceased mother that Hillary was America’s first woman president. Ironically, this emotional breakdown occurred in a masterclass the topic of which is “the power of resilience.” A woman who has spent the last five years whining about losing the election and now cries because she couldn’t, in her imagination, tell her mommy she won, is not resilient.

Still, any student who signs up for a MasterClass taught by Hillary Clinton has already drunk the Democrat Kool-Aid and will already have taken the side of a woman who rode her husband’s coattails as far as he could take her, at which point she fell down all by herself. A presidential candidate who calls at least half of the American electorate “deplorable” is a fool and deserves to lose.

There’s also the little problem of Hillary’s incredible corruption (making her and Biden birds of a feather). And of course, the fact that Hillary’s unsecure server damaged national security in a way that would have seen an ordinary, politically unconnected person spend the rest of her life in prison—which, not coincidentally, is where Papa Joe belongs for using his debauched son Hunter as the bagman for decades of anti-American corruption.

Still, even considering all those bad things about Hillary, there was still something worse: It was clear that she ran for office, not for America, but for Hillary. Sure, she wanted to turn the country as far left as Joe Biden is doing but, just as with Biden, Hillary was in it for self-aggrandizement. Biden, though, being a more savvy politician (it pains me to say that), hid his enormous self-centeredness a bit better than Hillary ever did.

And that gets us to Hillary’s prepared victory speech. You can listen to the part where she cries because that’s the newsworthy part, but I found most interesting what she told Willie Geist about her thinking as she wrote the thankfully unused speech (emphasis mine):

I worked on a speech that really was about my journey and that had a real emphasis on my mother’s life and journey as a way of, you know, making it clear that, yes, I would be the first woman president but I, like everybody, stood on the shoulders and lived the lives and experiences of those who came before us.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/woke-got-what-it-wanted-and-then-what/

The woke movement was giddy after January 20, 2021. The Left controlled both houses of Congress.

Joe Biden was drafted as the necessary veneer of 1980s Democratic normality to ram through an otherwise hard Left agenda. 

All the major cultural, financial, economic, entertainment, and media institutions had played various roles in seeing Donald Trump not just defeated, but also impeached twice. He was written off as persona non grata after the January 6 riot at the Capitol.  

So, academia, the corporate boardroom, Hollywood, the media, the Pentagon, professional sports, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in near hysterical fashion all boarded the woke train. 

All now boasted of ferreting out “white rage,” and hiring legions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” czars. 

Critical race theory would be mainstreamed to excise racism and discrimination by embracing racism and discrimination. 

“Crime” was to be seen now mostly as a construct created by the elite to protect their own privilege, prerogatives, and property. Shoplifting, looting, and street thuggery were just part of living in a normal city. 

Social justice warriors could replace defunded police. Gone would be most bail, incarceration, mandatory jail time, stop-and-frisk, and broken-windows deterrent policies. 

Green agendas would fundamentally transform America to put an immediate stop to man-made “climate change.” So, lots of oil and gas leases were either canceled or their fees vastly increased. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/vaccine-mandates-public-health-theater-and-endgame-daniel-greenfield/

State Democrats are discovering that a big chunk of their base hates vaccine mandates. And that mandates familiarly pit the minority and working-class elements of their base against the white leftist hipster upper-class chunk of their base. Much like Latinx.

And they’re having to choose.

Three months ago, as California Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM was turning around his fate in the state’s recall election, many Democrats came to the conclusion that they’d struck political gold. Mandates to get the Covid-19 vaccine weren’t just extremely valuable public health policy but they were electorally powerful too.

Now, moderate and frontline members of the party are singing a different tune.

I like the implicit acknowledgment that Newsom is an extremist. Or rather California Dems are.

 The most recent Democratic lawmaker to voice her concern was Michigan Gov. GRETCHEN WHITMER. Once considered to be Biden’s vice president, Whitmer said she opposes mandates, citing the impact on the state’s workforce — as Michigan grapples with upticks in cases and residents are split on whether or not to get the vaccine.

Gov. PHIL MURPHY (D-.N.J.), shortly before an unexpectedly close re-election win, shied away from embracing a strict vaccine mandate for teachers and other public workers. Gov. KATHY HOCHUL (D-N.Y.), who is running for election after taking over for disgraced former Gov. ANDREW CUOMO (D-N.Y.), has stated her opposition to a “broad-based mandate for all private-sector workers in New York.”

The Biden administration is still doubling down.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bette-midler-trump-devil-should-be-arrested-robert-spencer/

Bette Midler is enraged, and the object of her rage is all too predictable. The America-First President has been out of the White House for nearly a year now, but the Left still focuses on him with passionate intensity, using him as an all-purpose scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong (and there is so much) since they took over. Now the washed-up chanteuse, whose claim to fame is that time she brought us a stiff, lukewarm remake of the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” wants the threat neutralized once and for all: she is demanding that Trump be locked up and charged with attempted murder for trying to infect Old Joe Biden (everyone’s idea of a competent, capable president) with COVID-19.

When did Trump try to kill Old Joe, you ask? Why, it all goes back to the sensationalistic recent fake news claim that Trump had tested positive for the dreaded killer disease with a 99% survival rate before his first debate with Biden. As my PJ Media colleague Matt Margolis noted here Thursday, Trump’s test was actually a false positive, followed by two negative tests before the debate, so Old Joe was never actually in any danger.

Midler, however, was unmoved by these facts. She tweeted Friday to her two million Twitter followers, “#DonaldTrump should be arrested for attempted murder. He tried to infect & kill #JoeBiden at the debate; by turning up too late to be tested, knowing full well he was positive; then screeched, sputtered, spit, and foamed at the mouth, hoping to infect Joe. He IS the devil.” And then: “How many people did #TyphoidTrump knowingly infect with #Covid after he tested positive last year? Between that & producing Don Jr., Eric & Ivanka, it seems like #trumps fluids are hell bent on destroying the world.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome has long been a pandemic on the Left, but Midler is suffering from a particularly virulent strain. She has consistently been one of the most hysterical among the ranks of Leftist hysterics. Back in 2018, when one of Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) neighbors savagely beat him and put him in the hospital, Midler applauded the attacker. In August 2020, she mocked “this awful person,” Melania Trump: “Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.” In February 2021, it was the late Rush Limbaugh’s turn: “#RushLimbaugh has gone to his reward. Bet it’s hot.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yes-the-crime-wave-is-as-bad-as-you-think-murder-rate-violent-killings-shootings-defund-police-11638988699?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The U.S. experienced its largest-ever single year homicide spike in 2020, and crime now polls as one of the top voter concerns. This has many criminal-justice-reform advocates and their media allies scrambling to convince Americans that things aren’t really so bad, no matter what the data say.

At CNN, data journalist Priya Krishnakumar explains “how crime stats lie” by pointing out that 2020’s murder rate was “40% below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.” The Brennan Center for Justice acknowledges that the homicide trend is “frightening” but insists that murders “have stayed far below their peaks” in earlier decades. In a “fact check” of “the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing,” the Guardian reminds readers that “even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides” in 2020, “Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.”

True enough: The national murder rate was significantly higher in the 1980s and early ’90s. But the national murder rate reflects an aggregation of all the country’s homicides measured against the national population. When it comes to the recent upticks in killings, this talking point ignores two important realities.

First, we don’t live in the aggregate. The majority of Americans spend their lives in the communities where they live and, if they commute, where they work. Given how hyperconcentrated serious violent crime is—and, therefore, how widely the homicide rate can vary from one neighborhood to the next—the national homicide rate doesn’t provide most Americans with a sense of the dangers they face. A handful of extremely safe Illinois suburbs may counterbalance Chicago’s contribution to the national murder rate, but that’s little consolation to those who live in the South Side war zones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitalismthe-peoples-choice-11639000741?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Politicians and think tanks these days welcome the death of free markets as they support more power for the state. But a new poll from Gallup confirms that the American people still have more faith in capitalism than they do in socialism. Gallup further reports that this support for capitalism over socialism has held steady for more than a decade.

Asked in an October survey—“just off the top of your head”—whether they have a positive or negative image of six different economic and governmental terms, 60% reported “positive” for capitalism against 38% for socialism.

Gallup notes that the negative view of socialism has remained constant “even as Sen. Bernie Sanders and progressive Democratic politicians have pursued an expanded government role in addressing healthcare, poverty and early childhood education.” They might have noted that some of the push these days for more government control of economic life is coming from the political right as well.

The other positives and negatives are also revealing. “Small business” clocked in at 97% positive, and “free enterprise” at 84%. Only 46% of the public had a positive view for “big business,” which dropped from 52% in 2019.

We wonder if that’s because so many big businesses these days no longer support capitalism while stressing left-wing cultural causes. The two terms that scored lowest in public esteem were “socialism” and “the federal government,” which each had only 38% positive.

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/mandate/2021/12/08/id/1047926/

The Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate on Wednesday approved a Republican measure that would overturn President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine-or-test mandate for private businesses, with two Democrats joining Republicans to back the initiative.

The 52-48 vote sends the legislation to the Democratic-led House of Representatives, where it faces strong headwinds, while Biden has threatened to veto it.

The legislation would overturn administration rules ordering businesses with 100 workers or more to require vaccinations or coronavirus testing for millions of employees.

The measure was not subject to Senate rules that require 60 of its 100 members to agree on most legislation, meaning it could pass with just a 51-vote simple majority. Two Senate Democrats – Joe Manchin and Jon Tester – joined 50 Republicans in voting for the bill.

The initiative underscores the intense political opposition facing administration efforts to combat COVID-19 at a time when health officials are trying to contain the highly contagious Omicron variant.

Republicans have said they were inundated with calls from businesses with up to 500 workers that are concerned about having to fire employees who oppose COVID-19 vaccines and testing.

“It’s got Main Street America scared,” Republican Senator Mike Braun, who was spearheading the legislative drive, said before the Senate vote.

The White House said in a statement on Tuesday that employers would face no burden from the mandate because the vast majority of American adults are fully vaccinated and noted that the rule exempts small businesses.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/08/democrats-longtime-unity-sham-is-creating-a-dangerously-intolerant-next-generation/

President Joe Biden kicked off his time in the White House by preaching unity, but it quickly became clear that Democrats’ so-called mission for coexistence just meant “endorse our ideology or get steamrolled and canceled for trying to oppose it.”

Just this week, Biden, whose track record on COVID-19 and pretty much everything else is nothing to write home about, once again claimed that some top-down order would “unite” the divided country.

Ever since the rise of former President Donald Trump, Democrats have screamed at the top of their lungs about how conservatives and any other Trump allies are the worst people ever to inhabit the country. Leftists, aided by the corrupt corporate press, complained for four years that the Trump administration sowed division, and they advocated for impeachment and radical change. Their version of tolerance included letting boys into girls’ bathrooms and sports and calling anyone who dared question their methodology or candidates racist, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic.

Following Biden’s transition to the White House, the left’s disregard for unity became even more apparent, especially concerning COVID-19 vaccines. The Biden administration started by promoting the COVID shot as a good choice for Americans and even promised there would be no mandates. When Biden told Americans earlier this year, however, that “our patience is wearing thin” and “your refusal has cost all of us,” it became clear that anyone who stands in the way of his agenda, even though federal courts have temporarily suspended all of Biden’s civilian vaccine mandates, is the enemy.

Not only is Biden’s “unity” not uniting the country, but it’s certainly not making younger generations any more tolerant.

In a recent poll of 850 private and public college, university, and trade school students spread across the United States, Generation Lab and Axios found “Young Dems more likely to despise the other party.” While just 5 percent of young Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone who votes differently than they do, 37 percent of the young Democrats polled said they would end friendships based on voting records. An even higher number of Democrats, 41 percent, claimed they wouldn’t support a business they knew had political allegiances to other parties while just 7 percent of Republicans said the same.