RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/a-family-affair

Last year, I was asked by Hillsdale College to participate in their online symposium “Race in America: History and Controversies.” I prepared a talk about the black family that gave me the opportunity to outline the complex relationship between what goes on in black families and the larger social fabric in which those families are embedded. My ideas about these matters go all the way back to the economic theories I outlined in my doctoral dissertation at MIT, particularly the notion of “social capital.”

I describe that theory below, but to me the problem comes down to this: Until we recognize that many (though not all) of the economic problems in black communities originate in the social relationships fostered within the family unit, we’re not going to be able to make much headway in solving those problems. And make no mistake, the black family is in crisis. But simply saying that “those people” need to get their acts together and change their behavior is not a sufficient response to the problem. We need to stop thinking of black families who need help as “them” and start thinking of them as what they are: Us. The crisis of the black family is an American crisis. When we abandon black families by offering stern rebukes in place of real solutions, we’re not abandoning “them,” we’re abandoning ourselves.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/beginning-democrats-biden-defeat-merrick-garland-critical-race-theory/

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration.

In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border. The President insisted that the border was ‘closed’ (in the same way that he said that the cost of his doomed, $3.5 trillion spending plan was ‘zero’), but his own officials are prepping for a surge of 400,000 illegals in the month of October. Inflation is at a 30-year high, with no end in sight. Gas, food, housing, clothes: the prices of all are skyrocketing. The President came to office promising to ‘shut down’ COVID, not the country, but since he took office some 250,000 people have died and ineffectual mask mandates, vaccine mandates, St-Anthony-Fauci-certified mandate mandates have proliferated like pussy hats at an anti-Trump rally.

Several weeks ago, writing about the incineration of 10 innocent Afghans (including seven children) in an errant drone strike that the lying US military first said had killed an Isis-K operative, I pondered the proverbial expression ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Some trace that expression back to Thomas Hobbes, but I suspect the germ of the idea is much older. The basic idea, of course, is that an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, apparently insignificant, brings sudden disaster.

I wonder if Attorney General Merrick Garland has just supplied the proverbial straw that will send the camel that is the Biden administration crashing to the ground.

Garland was supposed to be a moderate. The Washington Compost assured its readers that there was a ‘98 percent probability that Merrick Garland is “in between” Ginsburg and Scalia. In other words, that he is comparatively moderate’. One of my friends even wrote that he was a ‘superb’ choice to be attorney general.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/04/group-that-harassed-kyrsten-sinema-funded-by-leftwing-billionaire-george-soros/

Leftwing billionaire George Soros funded the activist group that harassed Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a bathroom last weekend, The Free Beacon reported on Monday.

According to Soros’s Open Society Foundation grant database, Soros gave at least $1.5 million to Living United for Change in Arizona in 2019 and at least $250,000 in 2017 to become the group’s largest donor.

A group of demonstrators with Living United for Change followed Sinema into a bathroom at Arizona State University this weekend and filmed their repeated demands that she vote for President Joe Biden’s expensive “Build Back Better” plan and legislation that will give millions of illegal aliens U.S. citizenship.

Sinema later said that the pushy activists “deceptively enter[ed] a locked, secure building” before they posted a video harassing her and students using the restroom, behavior Sinema called “inappropriate.”

“Yesterday’s behavior was not a legitimate protest. It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” Sinema said in a statement on Monday.

Living United, which devotes time and effort to promoting leftwing candidates, also notably received thousands of dollars in funding from Bold PAC, “the fundraising arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus,” in August.

“The committee includes more than three dozen of Sinema’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate and House. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), and Robert Menendez (N.J.) are listed as members of the committee on the Bold PAC website. The senators did not respond to requests for comment about Living United’s confrontation of their Democratic colleague,” the Free Beacon reported.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/04/why-this-doctor-is-risking-the-nobel-prize-to-speak-out-against-universal-covid-19-vaccination/

American Greatness recently caught up with American doctor and virologist Robert Malone in Rome last month. He was there for the International COVID Summit at the Italian senate and hosted by senators from the radical Right Lega, which is a partner in Italy’s coalition government of national unity, led by the ex-boss of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi and dominated by the left-wing Partito Democratico and the alt-left Movimento 5 Stelle.

In this interview, Malone, who was among the pioneers of mRNA vaccine technology in the late 1980s, recounts his belief that genetic vaccines such as mRNA and viral vector vaccines may risk causing antibody dependant enhancement—where a vaccine causes the production of rogue antibodies, which coming into contact with the virus, act as a Trojan Horse shuttling it, now unchallenged by the immune system, directly into the host cell where it can replicate unhindered.

Malone is not against COVID-19 vaccines. But he is against compulsory and universal vaccination, which he thinks is potentially dangerous.

He believes that the viral load in vaccinated people who are infected is not just as high but possibly higher than the viral load in unvaccinated people who are infected—and thus that vaccinated people are potentially just as likely to transmit the virus as unvaccinated people.

The interview took place shortly before the announcement this week of this year’s Nobel Prizes, beginning with the prize for medicine on Monday, for which Malone was a contender.

Q: You are a frequent contributor to “The War Room”—the daily podcast by former Donald Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon—and on one occasion you said that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines might actually make COVID-19 infections worse. What did you mean by that?

Malone:  Not only the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, but also the viral vector vaccines Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca. Both these types of vaccines are genetic vaccines—they use genes to create antibodies—that’s different from traditional vaccines which work by introducing a small amount of the virus that causes antibodies. In vaccinology, one has to always be aware of the possibility that these genetic vaccines might enhance the development of immunologic disease—in other words, to cause the pathogen to become more infectious or cause more disease than would be observed without the vaccine. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/04/the-radical-prosecutor-in-charge-of-the-january-6-investigations/

In July, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia dismissed a case against a Black Lives Matter protester charged with attacking a federal police officer last summer in Lafayette Square. 

Channing Phillips, currently in charge of the office, dropped the charge after the defendant’s lawyer argued the facial recognition technology used to identify the suspect was unreliable and racist. Glenn Ivey, the defense lawyer, is a high-priced D.C.-area criminal attorney who just happened to work with Phillips in the 1990s.

The biased swamp in action.

Phillips, however, has not been as lenient with defendants facing charges for entering the Capitol on January 6. His office now is handling roughly 650 active criminal cases; the investigation is overwhelming his office and the court system. (On any given day, roughly half of the hearings in the D.C. federal district court are related to the Capitol breach probe.)

Channing Phillips is not a household name, but he is arguably one of the most powerful men in Washington right now, overseeing the Biden regime’s nationwide dragnet for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election. This is Phillips’ third stint as acting U.S. attorney for D.C., having been twice appointed by Barack Obama to temporarily fill the position. In between, Phillips worked as senior advisor for Attorney General Eric Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch.

In March, Phillips replaced Michael Sherwin, the first prosecutor in charge of the Capitol breach probe who bragged about unleashing a “shock and awe” crusade to arrest at least 100 Trump supporters before Biden’s inauguration.

Phillips is more low-key in public but his office is no less ruthless. His prosecutors continue to seek pretrial detention for anyone accused of violence, including assault of a federal officer, the same charge his office just dropped against a BLM protester. In some instances, Phillips’ lawyers want even nonviolent offenders to remain behind bars for months awaiting a trial or plea offer. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/it-took-biden-prove-swamp-wider-and-deeper-trump-lloyd-pettegrew/

“We should remember George Orwell’s 1984 alarm, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears…freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The Swamp’s two plus two equalizing whatever they want it to be must not continue to hollow out America! An almighty housecleaning is in order in 2022 and beyond.”

The late, great Angelo Codevilla (RIP), hardly the bombastic Donald J. Trump, offered a dire warning to Americans that the swamp (our ruling class) has pervaded nearly every aspect of American life. Republicans and conservatives in general must take heed or be permanently thrust into a minor party role. A menacing part of swampism is its absence of international borders as Mike Jones has articulated, Globalism belongs to a species of liberal thinking that deplores barriers to trade and disapproves strongly of borders…the key articulators of this movement now include not only Silicon Valley but also the military-intelligence complex, NGOs, and non-institutionalized protest groups whose global operations are facilitated by smartphones.”

Many of us find refuge in blaming our non-compos mentis current President. Sadly, the very system, from top to bottom and regardless of political affiliation, that derailed Donald Trump’s second term as President 45, has gleefully supported and defended Biden as their useful idiot. I have several friends who are never-Trumper Republicans, who I surmise voted against Trump and for Mr. Biden, regardless of his obvious and innumerable failings. Little did they know that the mean-tweeting Orange Man, who never did anything that wasn’t grand, boastful and beautiful, was our last hope against the Swamp becoming preeminent, possibly for our lifetimes.

When George W. Bush declared war on Afghanistan the evening of 9/11, 2001, one of his first squishy commitments was to hide credible information about our alleged friends, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar, by neglecting to justly implicate them as enablers to Osama bin Laden’s terror strike on American soil.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/10/marines-forced-remove-anti-taliban-graffiti-daniel-greenfield/

To quote Barack Hussein Obama, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

The Biden administration has expanded that to those who slander its new allies, the Taliban. 

A US Marine has shared his dismay at being forced to remove obscene messages insulting the Taliban and ISIS that they daubed on the walls of Kabul Airport. 

Three examples of the insults were shared to social media – with one showing a serviceman in front of a tiled wall at Hamid Karzai Airport sprayed with the phrase ‘F*** ISIS + Taliban’ in black paint, 

But an unnamed Marine stationed at Hamid Karzai said the graffiti painted on walls was removed at the orders of bosses, saying: ‘My boys had to go … pick up every last piece of … trash for who? The Taliban?’ a Marine told the Washington Post. ‘It was a slap in the face to us.’

That order was part of an edict which also saw troops ordered to pick up trash they’d strewn around the airport to frustrate the Taliban’s takeover. 

I’m guessing that any graffiti mentioning Biden also had to go.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/hillary-clinton-conspiracy-queen/

Two of the most corrosive dirty-tricks schemes in modern American history lead right back to her.

‘T here’s always been a kind of paranoid streak in American politics,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic Festival recently. “But it never was given such voice, such a platform, or had so much money behind it until we saw the rise of the right-wing radio voices like Rush Limbaugh, and we saw the rise of Fox News. And then, of course, the Internet just put it on steroids.”

It’s true, no doubt, that democratized media exacerbates the worst (and best) of human tendencies. Yet, it is quite jarring to hear this complaint coming from a person whose operatives were likely involved in birtherism and later were the driving force behind the Russian “collusion” hoax — two of modern political history’s most corrosive conspiracy theories.

Even as Hillary was going on about the devastating role that paranoia plays in our political interactions, Senior somehow forgot to ask her a single question about an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into her campaign’s role in concocting an oppo file and creating a narrative that the 2016 election was stolen by Putin. The week of the interview, Durham was reportedly handing down a new set of subpoenas on a law firm with ties to Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Last month, Hillary’s former lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted for allegedly giving false statements to the FBI in connection to a Clinton-campaign deception that engulfed nearly the entire political world for nearly five years. There has now been one more indictment for allegedly lying about Russian “collusion” in 2016 than there was for any criminal conspiracy tied to the election. Has anyone even asked Hillary about these indictments?

Even if Clinton was kept in the dark about the oppo file that was filled with half-baked lies and unverified bar talk — and being kept in the dark is the excuse she’s heavily leaned on her entire scandal-ridden career — she wasn’t merely an innocent bystander, looking on while dirty tricksters damaged trust in the system for political gain.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/04/the-research-that-shows-how-destructive-the-biden-spending-will-be/

It’s truly frightening how obsessed the Democrats are with spending nearly $5 trillion on infrastructure and social programs. They’re behaving as if our republic would buckle and collapse if their agenda isn’t passed. The real danger, though, are their ideas, which are economic IEDs.

More than 20 years ago, UCLA professors Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole, now a University of Pennsylvania professor, produced a report that showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies not only didn’t end the Great Depression, they extended the misery by seven years. Simply put, there was too much government intervention in the economy.

FDR’s policies and those of President Joe Biden and the Democrats are not entirely analogous. Ohanian and Cole focused “primarily on the impact of Roosevelt’s early policies that allowed for monopolies and too much union power to increase prices and salaries.” The Democrats’ bills are mostly, but not exclusively, about spending other people’s money.

Another difference: We are not in a depression. The country is recovering from a downturn caused by officials foolishly locking down the economy, which they told us was necessary to beat the pandemic.

However, we can expect at best a sclerotic economy, and depression-like conditions, if the Biden bills become law. The unbridled spending will exacerbate the inflation that’s disrupting the U.S. economy as well as compound the supply chain problems that are blowing “a stagflationary wind through the global economy.”

Citadel professor of ethics and free enterprise leadership Richard Ebeling calls “the fiscal mindset of those in the White House and in Congress who are proposing new federal budgetary expenditure,” and tax hikes “in the trillions of dollars,” a “fantasy land of financial irrationality.”