RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/08/the-worst-progressive-idea-yet-hey-lets

Awful ideas have sprung up from the craziness of this annus horribilis like poison mushrooms after spring rain. But no idea is as bad as Big City mayors and their D.C. Democrat allies calling for the abolition of police departments. Do they not understand that, without enforcement, there can be no rule of law? Or is that the idea?

The left’s war on the very idea of the law now seemingly knows no bounds.

Politicians have all but declared open season on their police departments, even as they decry the mayhem, chaos, death and destruction from more than a week of violent protests nationwide following the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Unless you’ve been quarantined without access to the internet, you know that Floyd died while in the custody of the Minneapolis police as an officer kneeled on his neck.

There has been no trial, no official investigation of Floyd’s death, and yet the all-left Minneapolis city council has already proposed a solution: Defund the police department.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” says a June 4 tweet from City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison. “We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.”

Progressive Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey opposes the idea. He thought he might prevail when he addressed an abolish-the-police crowd in his city over the weekend. He was wrong. He was booed, jeered and taunted, and forced to endure what more than one media outlet referred to as a “walk of shame” as he departed.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/09/if-you-want-to-know-what-disbanding-the-police-looks-like-look-at-mexico/

The rise of vigilante groups in Mexico offers a hint of what happens when institutions fail and civil society collapses. America should be paying attention.

One of the most visible and insistent demands of the Black Lives Matter movement is the abolition or disbandment of the police—or at the very least defunding them, which taken to the extreme would amount to the same thing. “Abolish the police” has become a rallying cry among protesters and a litmus test for elected officials seeking to ally with them.

What comes after the police have been abolished remains unclear. Protesters and politicians alike are hazy on details, preferring instead to talk about “reimagining public safety” and throwing around vague terms like “community policing.”

Of course, in concrete terms what would happen if a city actually disbanded its police department, as the Minneapolis City Council pledged to do over the weekend, is that the county sheriff’s office or the state police—or perhaps even federal law enforcement—would step into the vacuum and the city would have almost no say in how it was policed or what policies county and state law enforcement agencies adopted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/not-so-retiring-retired-military-leaders/

In a time of crisis, their synchronized chorus of complaints, falsehoods, and partisan appeals to resistance threaten the very constitutional order they claim to revere.

Sometimes retired generals are deified. Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower won two presidential terms in landslide elections.

At other moments, war heroes such Generals Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay were vilified as near insurrectionaries for their blistering attacks on sitting presidents.

In such a climate, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which became effective law in May 1951, prohibits active generals from disparaging their commander in chief — in the way perhaps MacArthur had bitterly pilloried then-president Harry Truman over the Korean War. Article 88 of the UCMJ makes it a crime to voice “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State.”

But no one quite knows, and debate continues over, whether such codified prohibitions on free expression apply to retired generals receiving military pensions. Yet, given the spate of recent “contemptuous words against the President” leveled from retired generals, it seems that few worry about regulation AR 27-10 of the code: “Retired members of a regular component of the Armed Forces who are entitled to pay are subject to the UCMJ. (See Art. 2(a)(4), UCMJ.) They may be tried by courts-martial for offenses committed while in a retired status.”

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The framework of a civil society is comprised of multiple threads, representing common traits like etiquette, respect for one another, accountability, deference to one’s parents and teachers. These customs are woven, along with art, music and literature, to form a nation’s cultural fabric. Culture includes traditions, knowledge of one’s own history and the history of one’s country – the good and the bad. It is what allows a civil society composed of those from myriad backgrounds, races, religions and opinions to amicably live together. Without the ability to civilly debate, darkness falls.

In the political world, there have always been extremists who refuse to comply with rules of civility that bind us. Those generally represent fringes of society. But extremism has become more mainstream, as political correctness, victimization and safe places have proliferated on our nation’s campuses. We have lost a moral sense of universal values. For example, the permitting of protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was right. The failure to condemn and confront violent rioters and looters was wrong.

Gerard Baker, in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal wrote about the old liberal order being under siege: “A basic tenet of the old liberal order is the toleration of views we find detestable.”  Today, illiberal Leftism compels submission to identity politics. How else to explain Joe Biden’s contemptuous outburst: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”