RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17982/confidence-in-ruler

An ancient philosopher is attributed to once observing that a nation can survive deprivation or even a battlefield defeat but it cannot survive the loss of confidence in its leadership.

As the Great Depression dismantled hopes and dreams across America, a president who had once rescued Europe from famine following World War I — and whose organizational skills as U.S. Secretary of Commerce were extraordinary — lost the confidence of his countrymen.

Hebert Hoover would lose his reelection bid to a man who inspired hope, trust, and most of all, confidence among citizens of a nation where nearly a quarter of them were out of work. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would receive nearly 23 million votes to Hoover’s nearly 16 million. The electoral vote was even more telling: 472 to 59.

Yet, as historians will remind us, Roosevelt, despite all of his initiatives, did not have the means to put an end to the Depression through most of his first two terms. What he did manage to do, however, was restore and sustain the confidence of the American people by allowing them to take pride in themselves and the belief that there was a future worth waiting for.

President Lyndon B. Johnson found a nation solidly behind him following the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet by the time he announced he would not seek a second term, his approval ratings had sunk to 36% as the Vietnam War stalemated in Southeast Asia and anti-war protests rocked our cities.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/28/a-tale-of-two-cities-kenosha-vs-waukesha/

Both Wisconsin towns, Kenosha, and Waukesha, about 50 miles apart by car, were the recent sites of multiple deaths. The violence in both made national news. Yet in contradictory ways both reflected the common themes of America’s current legal, media, and societal corruption.  

The relevant public prosecutors in both were in the news for alleged ideological bias. Specifically, they habitually calibrated the charging, indicting, and trying (or not) of defendants through ideological lenses and community pressure rather than on the basis of the facts and the law.  

Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old armed youth who volunteered to protect business properties at the height of the August 2020 arson, riots, and looting in Kenosha. He was pursued and attacked by three members from a larger group who chased the armed youth, presumably either to disarm, injure, or kill him—or perhaps all three. 

Rittenhouse variously was assaulted, kicked, and had a firearm pointed at him. In reaction, he fatally shot two of his pursuing attackers and wounded a third. Kenosha prosecutors reviewed videos of the altercations. They saw clearly that Rittenhouse was running away from his assailants. He was variously rushed by one assailant, kicked by another, and struck with a skateboard by still another. Again, a final pursuer pointed a gun at him at close range.  

No matter. The Kenosha district attorney’s office charged Rittenhouse with several felonies including two first-degree homicide charges. All four whom Rittenhouse fired at—whether he missed, wounded, or fatally shot—had lengthy arrest records. Three were convicted felons; the fourth had a long arrest record. 

Given the lengthy and quite horrific rap sheet of Rittenhouse’s first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum (including multiple counts of pedophiliac rape), it is difficult to understand why the latter was not in jail (he had been released earlier that day from a mental facility to which he had been committed after a failed suicide attempt). The common denominator to the various prior convictions of his other three assailants was that they should have led to consequences far worse, given that many of their arrest charges were dropped, or bail was sometimes waived, or plea bargaining turned serious charges into merely bothersome ones. The release of violent offenders on little or no bail seems now thematic in Wisconsin. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/lethal-mix-woke-rap-and-live-nation-thom-nickels/

On December 6, 1969, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones looked out over the massive crowd at California’s Altamont Speedway and saw the concert security staff, the Hell’s Angels, beating up an audience member. The Angels, who were paid in beer rather than cash to act as security that day, had apprehended a man named Meredith Hunter, 27, who attempted to approach the stage. When Hunter attempted to approach the stage again, this time with a revolver, he was beaten by the Angels and then stabbed to death by Angel Alan Passaro. The melee, which was captured on film, caused a nervous Jagger to announce, “People, people, let’s be cool!”

The murder of Hunter would come to be known as Rock’n Roll’s Darkest Day, officially marking the end of the 1960’s peace and love era which had its peak expression only months before at Woodstock.

The 1969 tragedy at Altamont has arguably been superseded in darkness by the troubling developments at Live Nation Entertainment – which bills itself as “the world’s leading live entertainment company.” The company’s recent production of the Astroworld Festival in Houston on November 2 saw 13 people killed and 300 injured when a crowd surge during the concert caused concertgoers to trample one another. Live Nation has a history of safety violations over the past decade. The massive concert enterprise also seems to thrive best in large Democrat-controlled cities where the urban landscape cultivates its own style of rough and tumble audiences and artists (Christian conservative rappers like Bryson Gray need not apply), especially artists who not so long ago specialized in ‘F—k Trump’ lyrics.

Consider my own city of Philadelphia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/undermining_democracy_with_chaos.html

America will not fall to an external enemy, but to internal subversion that will collapse the body politic. The method was advanced decades ago by two sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. They sought to create a guaranteed income by throwing the welfare rolls into chaos. They never succeeded and their obsession with it was not widely shared, but their emphasis on chaos to bring about dramatic social change found a receptive audience among Marxists and leftists.

Cloward and Piven’s emphasis on chaos had a vast appeal to Marxists because they found it impossible to organize a working class more concerned with immediate material benefits than revolution. Instead of organizing for revolution, the Marxist ideology moved to undermining democracy by creating chaos.

Not deterred by the failure of the street violence of the sixties to bring about the Marxist revolution, Piven, in 2012, was still clinging to her fantasies of violence and chaos as mechanisms for social change. As she noted, “Protest, even violent protest, is thus inextricably linked to the progress of democracy, whether in challenging dictatorships, or in keeping democratic regimes from neglecting the needs of their own people. The existential aspect of protest seems also to apply to some cases of violent protests in autocracies, and sometimes in democracies as well.”

This strain of sophistry that violence can create democratic progress, as absurd as it is, explains the tolerance of our institutions for the violence we have seen in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. This tolerance of violence stimulates the revolutionary fantasies of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.  

It is not simply in the streets that chaos is to bring about leftist socio-political change, but it is also true of the embrace of chaos in our institutions. Nowhere has the institutional threat been greater than in the activities of the so-called congressional “Squad” that has cleverly branded themselves as social justice warriors while seeking to produce chaos by defunding the police, leaning on the Biden administration to insert leftists in positions of power, and seeking to deluge the economy with obscene sums of money. The Squad knows that if printing money led to prosperity, Zimbabwe and Venezuela would boast the world’s two strongest economies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/yet_another_catastrophic_failure_from_our_massive_lavishlyfunded_intelligence_community.html

The devastating surrender of Afghanistan, a blot on American history that will play out for decades with unforeseeable strategic consequences, was preceded by catastrophically inept intelligence gathering. The US spends far more money – a total of $84.1 billion in 2021 – than anyone else on the planet, and yet seems to have been caught by surprise by the extent of  TRaliban infiltration of the cities in Afghanistan, enabling them to take over quickly as the US left.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov and Margherita Stancati note:

Undercover Taliban agents—often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses—spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations.

Then, as U.S. forces were completing their withdrawal in August, these operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, surprising their neighbors and colleagues. Pulling their weapons from hiding, they helped the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside.

The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming apparent only now, three months after the U.S. pullout. At the time, Afghan cities fell one after another like dominoes with little resistance from the American-backed government’s troops. Kabul collapsed in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired.

“We had agents in every organization and department,” boasted Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, a senior Taliban leader who directed suicide-bombing operations and assassinations inside the Afghan capital before its fall. “The units we had already present in Kabul took control of the strategic locations.”

There is much more, but it is behind a paywall.

Maybe if the intelligence community spent less time trying to control our own politicians and determine our elections, they would do better at their legitimate tasks.