RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/18/the_totalitarian_tendencies_of_the_woke.html

One of the best-selling books in America right now, Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” calls for some astonishingly autocratic policies. It would establish a federal Department of Anti-racism with veto power over any local, state, or federal policies considered racially inequitable by its bureaucrats. (No one in the agency would be appointed by or accountable to the president or Congress.) It would also “investigate private racist policies” and “monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas … empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” 

This proposal to tear up both the checks and balances on executive fiat in Washington and the protections for individual rights embedded in our Constitution is one indicator among many that woke activists have fallen headlong for authoritarianism.

Their very language of group conflict and oppression is of course taken directly from Marxism. And there is a harsh intemperance and lack of proportionality in the behavior of today’s social-justice warriors. They say white supremacism is universal in America, not an aberration. Their favored graffiti spray tag is “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards). They want to defund and shut down police departments, not fix them. They call for lawmakers to “abolish ICE” and fling our southern border wide open. There is a growing fanaticism in which gray arguments and toleration for opposing points of view disappear.

If politics is the methodical organization of resentments, identity politics runs on the methodical organization of rage. Rage is an awful fuel for the gradual give-and-take needed to produce social progress in a non-authoritarian democracy. Alas, the Americans under age 30 who are manning the barricades of identity socialism loathe messy give-and-take. They prefer, as columnist Bari Weiss has noted, to squash resisters. Revolution rather than reform is increasingly the goal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-puts-the-i-in-the-high-holy-days-11600383609?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Lord Sacks was chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 1991-2013.

This year the Jewish High Holy Days will be like no other. Usually the synagogue is packed on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, with a buzz of noise that is not all prayer. The haunting call of the shofar, or ram’s horn, summons Jews to judgment. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we are on trial—giving an account of our lives, confessing our sins endlessly, going through every letter of the alphabet, including not a few offenses many of us wouldn’t have had the time, energy or inclination to commit. It is powerful, purgative, and ultimately purifying. We need this annual reset of our lives.

The sense of closeness and intimacy that comes with the crowd makes these days what they are: “The glory of the king is in the multitude of people.” Yet that won’t be present this year. Almost everywhere, prayers won’t be like that at all. Some synagogues’ doors will remain closed. Others will have social distancing, face masks, restrictions on communal singing, and other necessary precautions that restrict the number of people present and their proximity to one another. For a community-minded faith like Judaism, this almost feels like an amputation. The services are bound to feel hollow and lacking in atmosphere. This isn’t how the Days of Awe are supposed to be.

In this respect, Judaism has much in common with other faiths. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others have had to cancel or restrict public prayer when believers needed it most. All religious leaders have struggled to provide the comfort of faith, the uplift of prayer and the solace of sacred space. Yet Judaism, like other faiths, has proved creative in finding alternative ways to create moments of inspiration.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/lefts-moral-compass-isnt-broken-dennis-prager/

All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken.

And all of my life, I was wrong.

Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.

I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.

This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms — what we call “Judeo-Christian” — that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.

But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”

It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class — worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.

https://www.wnd.com/2020/09/oppressed-minority-police-officers/

Exclusive: Gamaliel Isaac notes most cops’ actions are ‘driven by crime and not by race’

Since the Black Lives Matter riots, corporate and academic indoctrination of staff into believing that they are unconsciously racist, that blacks can’t be racist and that police and the system is racist, has been increasing. Employers such as my own list alleged black victims of police racism to justify their indoctrination training. A typical list might consist of the following names: Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Dion Johnson, Michael Brown, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Tamir Rice and George Floyd. These institutions don’t explain why a racist act by a policeman implies anything about whether or not their employees are racist. In addition, if we examine the tragic stories of the people in these lists we discover that they are generally cases of self defense and not racism.

In the tragic case of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend shot a policeman before he and his fellow officers shot back. Tony McDade pointed his gun at a policeman before the policeman shot back. Dion Johnson tried to grab a policeman’s weapon, and in the struggle that followed he was shot. Rayshard Brooks fired a taser at a policeman before he was shot. Atatiana Jefferson pointed a gun at a policeman before he shot her. Tamir Rice pointed a toy gun, whose orange barrel had been removed so that it looked like a real gun, at officer Loehmann who then shot Tamir. Officer Loehmann explained his actions with: “I knew it was a gun, and I knew it was coming out.” Michael Brown ran toward Officer Darren Wilson and wouldn’t stop despite repeated commands to get down on the ground.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/2020-election-democrats-promise-to-be-sore-violent-losers/

Attorney General Bill Barr’s critics rehash failed 1990s arguments.

In a conference call last week, Attorney General Bill Barr urged federal prosecutors to be aggressive in filing charges against violent anti-American radicals who are rioting in various cities, attacking government buildings, and targeting law-enforcement officers. The AG reportedly recommended a range of offenses, including seditious conspiracy.

Instantly, according to the Wall Street Journal, “legal experts” warned that the “rarely used statute could be difficult to prove in court and potentially run up against First Amendment protections.”

These are the same arguments that legal experts posited when I charged terrorists with seditious conspiracy for bombing the World Trade Center and plotting to bomb other New York City landmarks in 1993. The experts were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The seditious-conspiracy statute, which is codified by Section 2384 of the modern federal penal code, was actually enacted by Congress during the Civil War — mainly to deal with Confederate sympathizers in free states who were violently sabotaging the Union war effort. As the Journal’s experts observe, it is rarely used. That is not because the crime is especially difficult to prove; it is much more straightforward than many federal crimes. Rather, it is because the conduct at issue — dangerous conspiracies to levy war against the United States, to violently overthrow our government, or to violently oppose the government’s legitimate authority — is historically unusual.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/how-understand-enduring-trump-hatred-bruce-bawer/

I know you. You’re somebody I know well or slightly or only as a public figure, and you hate Trump.

No, you’re not out rioting and destroying and burning, but you’re doing your part. You ruin your TV shows or podcasts, which are purportedly about non-political topics and which I otherwise enjoy, by interjecting Democratic rah-rah rhetoric. One of you, for example, in the middle of a podcast about old movies and TV, broke without warning into a pro-Democratic rant, expressing the urgent hope that Texas will “turn blue” in November. Two others, on a podcast about the arts, actually asserted that the Democratic convention was splendidly produced and deeply moving.

Consistently, you talk about politics as if it were still, I don’t know, 1990, or earlier, when there were Republicans like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond on the Hill, when there were no socialists or sharia advocates in the House Democratic caucus, and when nobody had ever heard of gender non-binaries.

Some of you don’t have TV shows or podcasts. You’re just ordinary citizens, friends or acquaintances of mine who sit at home and reflexively share anti-Trump memes on your social-media accounts. Most of those memes misrepresent facts that I damn well know you haven’t got a clue about, one way or the other. You don’t seem interested in learning the facts. You just want to hammer Trump. Facts or lies, it doesn’t matter. For some reason, it makes you feel good.

This is nothing new. You opposed him, virulently, in 2016. On election night, as one state after another went his way, you were in a panic. And with good reason – or so, at least, it seemed to you at the time.

You had bought into the argument that he was dangerously unstable and that with him in the White House the world would go spinning out of control. The possibilities of misadventure were endless. First off, he would pull us out of NATO and the UN. Then, who knew? The sky was the limit. He could set off Armageddon by saying something crazy on the phone to Putin or Xi or Kim Jong Un. He could order sudden, unwarranted troop build-ups and fleet movements that would ratchet up tensions. Or he might even – in fact he almost certainly would – order an unprovoked, unilateral invasion of some foreign country or other. Iran, say, or North Korea. Or Venezuela. Or someplace in Africa. Who knew? With this madman, anything could happen.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/scott-atlas-attacked-for-joining-white-house-covid-19-task-force/

Dr. Scott Atlas is under attack from former Stanford colleagues for joining the Trump administration’s COVID task force.

Cancel culture has come to medicine. Dr. Scott Atlas, who was chairman of neuroradiology at Stanford’s medical school until 2012 and more recently a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, has been singled out for professional erasure by 98 of his former Stanford medical, epidemiological, and health-policy colleagues because he had the temerity to join President Trump’s coronavirus task force and advocate rational measures for safely reopening the economy. Their criticisms are unfair, yet typical of today’s political and academic climate.

Atlas’s one-time colleagues published an open letter to other medical-school faculty accusing him of “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that “run counter to established science.” The letter — written on Stanford Medicine letterhead that falsely suggests the imprimatur of the medical school — does not cite any publications or specific statements by Dr. Atlas and does not specify exactly what “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” he allegedly made. But it insinuates that his “failure to follow the science — or deliberately misrepresenting the science — will lead to immense avoidable harm.”

The letter lists five statements supported by “the preponderance of data” and implies that Atlas disagrees with them. The first says that face masks, social distancing, and handwashing reduce the spread of Covid-19. The authors do not cite anywhere where Atlas made claims to the contrary. A recent New York Times article claiming Atlas doubts the efficacy of mask wearing miscites an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson in which Atlas actually said people need not wear masks when they are alone but should wear masks when around others and unable to socially distance.

https://dianebederman.com/the-nobel-peace-prizedonald-trump-and-barack-obama/

In 2009 Barack Hussein Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize – not for anything he had done but because he had been elected. He won for being black. Well, the first Black American President. Well, not really black: he is bi-racial; mom was white, dad was black. Well, not really. Dad wasn’t black as in a Black American; he was from Kenya. But why let details get in the way of a heart-warming story?

Wonder what the Nobel people would say looking back at their choice. Did Barack Obama bring peace, anywhere?

Let’s look at the Middle East.

Obama referred to ISIS terrorists as the JV team. Nothing to worry about here. Was this the team that abducted James Foley, an American journalist, in Syria in 2012 and then murdered him in 2014?

Would this be the same team that burned Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh in the Syrian city of Raqqa and posted by the Islamic State on Feb. 3, 2015?

Seems the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a group that loves to share their Junior Varsity abilities in videos, also murdered 16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car in Iraq in 2015. Lovely.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/14/segregation-makes-a-comeback/

If we cannot rally around equality before the law and within our institutions, and embrace color blindness within our own hearts, then we will not survive as a nation.

Dust off your “2020 bingo card.” Even with all this year’s craziness—impeachment; millions of acres of hellfire spreading across California; a global pandemic unleashed by China (which was also the occasion to shut down the engine of the greatest economy the world had ever seen); more than 100 consecutive days of rioting and looting in Portland, Oregon (not to mention similar criminal activity taking place across the country since the death of George Floyd in May)—did you seriously ever expect you’d be covering the square that reads, “American university unironically and enthusiastically endorses Plessy v. Ferguson”?

Didn’t think so.

But you’d better dig up your chips because that’s what very nearly happened at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. (2020 needs to slow down.)

The university tried to bring back Jim Crow-era segregation. The Center for Social Justice and Inclusion (CSJI) recently advertised its creation of a “Non-POC Cafe.” In plain language, it’s a (virtual) cafe just for white students, i.e., those who “do not identify as people of color,” “to gather and to discuss their experience as students on campus and as non-POC in the world.”

It goes on: “Feel free to drop in and discuss your experiences as non-persons of color and hopefully brainstorm solutions to common issues within the non-POC community. The Cafe will be facilitated by a non-POC faculty/staff member to ensure that discussions are kept safe and respectful.” (Go back and re-read that: CSJI considers whites are non-persons of color. Tell us how you really feel!)

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/14/how-the-1960s-riots-foreshadow-todays-communist-weaponization-of-black-pain/

“To Truly Help Black People, Reject BLM-Why is this all of this so vitally important? Because right now, many well-intentioned Americans believe they are helping black people by putting Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards. A number of corporations believe they are helping stamp out racism by donating millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter. Middle schools and high schools across the country are using a curriculum developed by Black Lives Matter to teach children that America is riddled with systemic racism.But in fact, Black Lives Matter is not about helping black people. It is about using black people to achieve the co-founders’ revolutionary, ideological aims.”

Many would have us believe that the riots and violence sweeping across America’s cities this year are spontaneous. But history and current evidence tell us otherwise.

Leaving the White House grounds recently, I knew I would encounter protestors. You could hear them throughout the evening, trying to disrupt.

Most of the protestors were to the east and north of the White House, so staff directed us to exit out the west gate. A security guard offered to accompany me and my husband south to Constitution Avenue to meet our Uber driver, and we went safely home.

We heard numerous stories the next morning of guests who had been threatened and endangered. One friend with whom we had walked out of that west gate actually decked a foul-mouthed biker. The biker had veered too close to our friend’s wife while shouting threats and obscenities, and the husband then acted as a man might reasonably be expected to — he punched the guy.

Elsewhere, dozens of angry protestors surrounded Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife Kelley as they left the White House grounds. Eventually, more police officers arrived and escorted the couple to the safety of their hotel.

Sen. Paul later reported: “After we got back to our hotel room and some safety we heard something frightening. The ‘protesters’ were staying on our floor — including the room next door to us. They were talking about their mob activities and even saying they thought we were here on this floor. We had to develop a 3 a.m. plan with the Capitol Police to get to safety.”

Paul asks, “Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in?” What he saw that night led him to conclude, “It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent.”