RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2021/12/18/trumps-alleged-anti-semitism-n1542666

“There’s people in this country that are Jewish [who] no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews of this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress, and today I think it’s the exact opposite. And I think [former President Barack] Obama and [President Joe] Biden did that.

“And yet in the election, they still get a lot of votes from Jewish people, which tells you that the Jewish people—and I’ve said this for a long time—the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel. I mean, you look at The New York Times, The New York Times hates Israel. Hates them. And they’re Jewish people who run The New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family.”

The line about “absolute power over Congress” is cringeworthy. Yes, it is an anti-Semitic trope. Trump fits the canonical definition of a philo-Semite (an anti-Semite who likes Jews). He harbors some anti-Semitic prejudices about the extent of Jewish power. But he’s still a friend of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel. Before the 2016 election, an Israeli politician asked me what I thought of Trump (full disclosure: I worked for Ted Cruz in 2016). I said, “Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews!” I published that malicious remark. Nonetheless, I voted for Trump twice and defended him against the Deep State conspiracy to unseat him. There are anti-Semites and anti-Semites, but I’ll get to that.

As my friend Caroline Glick writes in Israel Hayom:

Trump was the most pro-Israel president in history. None of his predecessors, (and certainly not his successor President Joe Biden), come close….[he]stopped US financial support for the Palestinian Authority and shut down the PLO’s representative office in Washington, DC because Abbas funds and incites terrorism.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/breaking-joe-manchin-just-killed-the-build-back-better-act-n1542721

After months of negotiations failed to achieve an adequate compromise, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) declared on Sunday that there’s no way he can support Joe Biden’s big government socialist agenda, known as the Build Back Better Act.

Manchin said on Fox News Sunday that he worked hard to reach an acceptable compromise.

According to Manchin, the legislation being pursued by Democrats was just too much on top of historic inflation, the national debt, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve done everything humanly possible,” he said. “When you have these things coming at you the way they are right now … I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation.”

“This is a no,” he added. “I have tried everything I know to do.”

With the U.S. Senate split 50-50, Joe Biden needed every single Democrat to back the legislation. With Joe Manchin officially declaring he cannot support the bill, The Build Back Better Act is, at least for now, dead.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/19/fauci-orchestrated-quick-and-devastating-takedown-of-anti-lockdown-experts-n1542717

New emails released by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that last year, outgoing National Institutes of Health Dir. Dr. Francis Collins instructed Dr. Anthony Fauci to carry out a “quick and devastating” takedown of The Great Barrington Declaration, a document authored by experts who advocated for herd immunity to stop the pandemic, and “focused protection” for the most vulnerable populations over universal lockdowns.

According to the declaration, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health” that will lead to “greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. ”

“Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” states the declaration.

“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls,” the declaration continues. “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity … Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”

This, it seems, was unacceptable to Collins and Fauci.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/18/what-happened-to-the-riots/

In the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, the country was beset by protests that turned into riots. Major cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. were in flames, with Black Lives Matter and Antifa shock troops leading the way. Then, after the tense period between the election and inauguration, the riots mostly stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch.  

Of course, violence still exists. Violent crime is up significantly nationwide, just as it rose after the often-violent anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. And, in Portland, riots and the Antifa culture of violent resistance to authority have become somewhat institutionalized. 

But, for the rest of the country, the riots have stopped. This, even though police still occasionally shoot suspects, and sometimes those shootings are controversial. And there is also still a great deal of political division nationwide. Even so, the end to the riots has been a bit surprising.

The disappearance of the Left’s riots confirms what many have suspected: that they were centrally planned. On the surface, this was hard to believe. Antifa looked like Darwin’s waiting room, a gaggle of meth-mouthed degenerates, many with criminal records and obvious mental health problems. They were augmented by ordinary street thugs, amped up by the anti-police rhetoric of Black Lives Matter. 

But it turns out both groups had a lot of support and included prominent, professional members. They also had internal organization, including encrypted communications channels, supply trucks, and extensive training for their cadres. This is all well documented in Andy Ngo’s exposé, Unmasked.

They also benefited from friendly media. The media willingly repeated their disinformation about how minor the riots were, with CNN’s use of the phrase “fiery, but mostly peaceful protests” revealing the extent of the agitprop. Antifa and BLM occupied a Seattle neighborhood for weeks, during which several people were robbed, beaten, and killed. Nonetheless, the mayor described it as having a street festival atmosphere. The media and officials downplayed the millions of dollars in damage, assaults, and murders.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/18/the-freedom-facade/

I have been looking back over Alexis de Tocqueville’s unfinished masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It is full of piquant observations, for example this from the end of the preface: “a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” How much contempt do you suppose emanates from the apparatchiks who inhabit the D.C. swamp and control our lives? How slavish is their devotion to the unfettered prerogatives of the idol they serve, the state? 

That dialectic between adulation of the sources of power and contempt for those subject to it may in one sense be perennial, a sentiment captured by the old Latin tag: Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris: “it is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” But Tocqueville translated that psychological characteristic into the realm of politics in which the question of liberty is paramount. Like Edmund Burke, Tocqueville was a supreme anatomist of the ways in which power co-opts the passion for liberty in order to counterfeit liberty’s essence. Describing the habit of “governmental paternalism,” Tocqueville notes that “Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms.”

This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day. Rulers flatter themselves that they can combine the moral strength given by public consent with the advantages that only absolute power can give. Almost all have failed in the enterprise, and have soon discovered that it is impossible to make the appearance of freedom last where it is no longer a reality.

I think that is more or less where we are now. You still hear people talk about the importance of individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, and so on, but increasingly, I believe, the slogans are shot through with a brittle cynicism. 

One sign of that decadence is the resignation that now greets every fresh assault on the impartiality upon which the rule of law, and hence liberty, depend. In a recent column for the Daily Signal, Larry Elder asks “Why hasn’t Jussie Smollett been charged with perjury?” It’s a good question, and it’s one everyone knows the answer to. Smollett belongs to a protected class (actually, he belongs to several protected classes). As a black, gay, celebrity (“celebrity” for some: like Larry Elder, I had never heard of him until he ran afoul of the law), Smollett is more or less untouchable. True, he was just convicted of 5 out 6 felony counts for staging his own assault, but many commentators are speculating that he will serve no jail time for committing what can only be described as a racially motivated hate crime. 

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-woke-constitution/91832/

To those who wonder why the Founding Fathers made the United States Constitution so difficult to amend, we commend the series the Boston Globe is publishing under the headline “Editing the Constitution.” It reckons that our national parchment “is undergoing massive changes in the Supreme Court” and that it’s “time to put the founding document in the hands of the people.”

Bah, humbug, we say. It adds up to one of the most cockamamie compendiums that’s ever been compiled in respect of the 8,000 or so words of the compact that every officer, judge, and legislator of the federal, state, and county governments must be bound by oath to support. If Geo. Washington, James Madison, and the boys ever happened onto this issue of the Globe, they’d fall out of their knee socks.

The series starts with a proposed rewrite of the first two amendments. Freedom of speech would get diluted to freedom of “expression” and have to be “consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses.” The Globe would throw in a previously unenumerated freedom — “association” — but require all rights to be resolved in accordance with the principles of “equality” and “dignity.”

Then the Globe adds another new liberty — the “freedom from religion.” It says: “Both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion shall be respected by the government.” Notice the subtle — or, hey, not so subtle — suggestion that religion is some God-awful pest. The words “free exercise” are freely exorcised. And the disestablishment by Congress of religions established by the states would no longer be prohibited.

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

It’s between crazed Marxists and the rest of us—and the way to change things is at the ballot box.

We are all aware of the deadly and avoidable crime wave plaguing cities that Marxists run. I am sure the people that live in these communities have been complaining. After all, how could they not? We have had two years of a rolling criminal snowball that has grown to ginormous proportions.

I noticed the uptick in the crime in New York in January 2020 when the “Bail Reform” law went into effect. Slowly on the local news, you heard about someone coming up the steps from the subway and getting cold-cocked in the face, elderly people getting thrown down and beaten, and other violent street crimes.

It grew from there and, after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the kerosene was thrown on the previously slow-burning fuse. The Marxists tried telling us the crime wave was due to the pandemic but I knew—and believe others did too—that it started weeks before the first case of COVID was reported in the United States.

Like a cancer, the effects of these policies took a while to spread and then accelerated quickly. The same pattern was repeated across America as other cities implemented “Bail Reform” and defunded their police departments. All the while, George Soros and other Marxist billionaires hell-bent on destroying this country helped install District Attorneys who refuse to prosecute criminals and judges who put repeat violent offenders back on the streets. Add in governors emptying prisons in the name of Covid and—voila!—instant anarchy.

I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t care how much money Soros and his cabal put behind someone. I would never vote for anyone who advocates for emptying prisons and so-called “Bail Reform” or anyone backed by organizations such as Color of Change or The Tides Foundation. Still, enough people voted for these lunatics to give them power. Now, though, the same people regret their votes, yet no one is listening to them.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently spoke out against the smash-and-grab robberies that are now becoming commonplace. What’s interesting is that, when it was just the local small businesses, no leftists seemed to care. When it was retailers for people in the lower- to mid-level economic strata (e.g., Walmart, Target, and CVS), leftists shrugged their shoulders. But when it’s Nordstrom’s, Louis Vuitton, or the Apple store, now elected officials are paying attention.