RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-dies-in-darkness-but-dont-blame-trump-11594661547?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Remember the grave warnings when Donald Trump was elected about how his presidency would usher in an unprecedented assault on freedom of expression?

Ululations of orchestrated hysteria went up from the nation’s media. It was 1933 again. Late Weimar America would succumb to an authoritarian with a distinctive haircut and a penchant for intolerant rhetoric.

A few weeks before the 2016 election, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a thunderous warning: “A Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which some have noted sounds like the working title for an inferior James Bond movie, became the daily front-page leitmotif of a major newspaper, its reporters bravely committed to holding aloft the flickering lamp of freedom amid the gathering gloom of tyranny.

Four years on, it’s clear the warnings were justified. Consider the state of free speech in Mr. Trump’s America. Newspaper editors are forced to quit because of pieces they’ve run. Academics are removed from positions for daring to dissent from the dominant orthodoxy. Corporate executives have been fired for opinions written three decades ago that now fall outside the lines of acceptable public discourse.

In classrooms, newsrooms and boardrooms across the country, you can almost hear the silence as people internally check what they say in the knowledge that if they cross the line they’ll be publicly denounced and very likely terminated.

The darkness has indeed claimed democracy.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/09/blm-rebels-without-a-cause/

Around the world, people understandably reacted in anger and disgust at the killing of George Floyd. But if the subsequent protests, which descended, at points, into riots, lootings and indiscriminate iconoclasm, are meant to increase racial harmony and deter police brutality, then they’ve failed spectacularly.

In a few short weeks, more black people have died from the chaotic and indiscriminate violence, excused by leftist media and politicians, than unarmed black people at the hands of the supposedly racist police in the whole of 2019.

But were the protests at least built on a solid foundation? Is there rampant racism in the police force, and systemic racism in the US as a whole? In short, no.

Are police killing black people more than whites?

Derek Chauvin, who killed Floyd, is now under arrest and awaiting trial. He is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. In this instance the legal system is clearly not racist. Moreover, Minneapolis chief of police, Medaria Arradondo, is black – a fact that undercuts the charge that the Minneapolis police department is systemically racist.

Racists do exist, of course. And there will be racists in the 800,000-strong US police force. But to say that the US is systemically racist is a different claim. And too many people are unable to make this distinction, or worse, propagate a narrative that deliberately blurs it.

In an essay on the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of the mid-2010s, I referred to studies from Harvard, Washington State University and the City University of New York, which all suggested that police in the US do not shoot blacks more than whites. In fact, the evidence suggested they are less likely to shoot black suspects.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/13/democrats-let-the-vandals-in-the-gate-and-joined-them/

There is today an air of illegitimacy and political thuggishness about the increasingly illiberal Democrats who seem bent on destroying both logic and the evenhanded rule of law.  Democrats erase facts, cancel people, proscribe and punish unwanted thought and speech. They discriminate on the basis of race and gender, taking away and giving to the favored the jobs, money and property of the disfavored. Hypocrisy sets the standard and Jacobin-like terror enforces it.

A radicalized Democratic Party is no more a normal political party benignly participating in the American electoral system than communist China is a normal nation participating in international trade and diplomacy in a benign and above-board manner.

It is easy to see the onrushing menace, but in America today, with constitutional protections and ordinary human decency already being swept aside by powerful Democrat forces in the Congress, in the media and in the streets, it is dangerous to sound the alarm and make oneself a target for retribution.

Avert your eyes, bend your knee and remain silent or suffer the consequences!

First, the evildoers came for President Trump with false charges and illegitimate prosecutions; then they illegitimately came for Judge Kavanaugh, General Flynn and others; soon, if they win or steal the election, a jackbooted squad of political sociopaths will come for all dissident Americans who refuse to knuckle under and be dehumanized by authoritarian Democrats.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/13/are-we-in-the-first-days-of-a-lawless-era/

Civilized people don’t behave in this way. When some portion of a society goes beyond the law, the larger portion has historically made the course correction. Today, it’s a far smaller segment than it has been in the past.

A nation founded on the rule of law appears to be yielding to the rule of the mob. Not everyone has surrendered. The trend, though, is worrisome. Too many of our “leaders” and institutions are failing us.

In 2020, law enforcement officers in this country are being treated not just with disrespect but in many instances are being abused verbally and physically. Rioters and looters are going unpunished, not because they can’t be identified or the cases against them are weak but because prosecutors (several of them backed by George Soros) refuse to uphold the law and charge the offenders. Violent gangs have been allowed, almost encouraged, to take over city streets, sidewalks, and private property; shut down the free movement of others; and topple public monuments.

Civilized people don’t behave in this way. When some portion of a society goes beyond the law, the larger portion has historically made the course correction. Today, it’s a far smaller segment than it has been in the past.

Right here we’re going to say something that might seem over the line. We believe that “the mobs of tearful, angry students,” as the Washington Post put it, who raged after the 2016 election, the current convulsion of violence, as well all the unrest in between, wouldn’t have occurred if Hillary Clinton was president. What we’re seeing is an extended tantrum over the Trump election.

https://spectator.us/the-vanity-of-white-guilt/

When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down my new pink frock. I scuttled to my room to change, bunching the dress under the bed. I emerged the picture of innocence, but I felt guilty. For weeks, the garment pulsed with accusation. Going to sleep, I always knew it was there.

Sure enough, my mother discovered the wad while vacuuming, and she was furious. She could have scrubbed out the juice had I told her about it right away. To this day, I’m mindful that you can only expunge stains while they’re still fresh — and somewhere in there lurks a metaphor.

I’m not prone to remembering the ingestion of individual pieces of fruit. That small memory looms as a touchstone for the experience of culpability. I’d not acted responsibly, and I’d compounded my malfeasance with concealment. When called out, I hung my head with nothing to say for myself. The last thing I felt inclined to do was to tear outside and advertise to the whole neighbourhood that I’d been a bad little girl.

Though the concept of collective ‘white guilt’ has been with us since at least the 1960s, it’s seen quite the fashionable resurgence in the wake of the George Floyd protests last month. As universities, businesses and celebrities fall all over themselves to banner their racial blameworthiness, pale-faced mea culpas gather into a deafening chorus.

The issues are two. First, one of this column’s running themes: emotional fraudulence. Clarion declarations of moral dereliction do not have the texture of guilt. They are prideful. They have the texture of preening. Elaborate racial apologies are a form of showing off. When last month the actress Jenny Slate resigned from the animated Netflix show Big Mouth because voicing a half-black character was ‘an example of white privilege’ and ‘an act of erasure of black people’ within ‘a system of societal white supremacy’, she wasn’t making a career sacrifice, but bidding for elevated status.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/jews_against_themselves.html

Jews are now commemorating what is known as the Three Weeks.  It is when Jews express grief for the destruction of the Holy Temple in ancient Israel.  The Temple was breached by the Romans in 69 C.E.  The mourning period concludes with a fast to remember when both Holy Temples were set aflame.  Thus, Tisha B’Av (Ninth of Av) is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.

These calamitous events, among others, came from outside the Jewish world but have impacted it for centuries.  What is happening today in America and abroad is that Jews are deliberately working against themselves.  Why are so many Jews joining forces with a known anti-Semitic group such as the Black Lives Matter?

In his 2015 book titled Jews Against Themselves, Edward Alexander examines the various strains of thought that many Jews have adopted.  The ultimate aim of each strain is the hollowing out of Judaism and the obliteration of Israel.  These approaches pit Jewish particularism against Jewish universalism, the latter which results in undermining Jewish interests and lives.  In essence, it is “Jewish suicidalism [sic].”

For example “Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight anti-Semitism … maintains that it is ‘wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning anti-Semitism.'”  In short, Butler dismisses actions such as BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and cannot comprehend that they are overtly anti-Semitic.  She is wearing blinders while maintaining the alleged moral high ground.

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2020/07/09/in_war_its_total_victory_or_nothing_498690.html

There’s a longstanding maxim that states that only the complete destruction of one’s enemies will suffice. Merely winning a particular battle is not enough. If they survive the defeat and can come back to fight another day, then the ultimate victory is not assured. In contrast, the contest still hangs in the balance and the outcome of any one battle may not be the overriding determinate of the final result.

This thought is summed up in the work “The 48 Laws of Power,” a best-selling 1998 book by American author Robert Greene. Law 15 states, “…. a feared enemy must be crushed completely. If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation. The enemy will recover and seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.”

Examples of this truism abound in history. There are several examples of when tactical battles were won but the bigger strategic objective was lost, with disastrous long-term consequences.

Dunkirk 1940
After Nazi Germany’s 1940 spring offensive against Western Europe, the last remaining Allied combatants — France and Great Britain — found themselves defeated and cornered in the French coastal town of Dunkirk. Over 300,000 French and British troops (along with a small number of Polish forces that had survived the campaign against Germany the previous September) were trapped after marauding German Panzer forces had crushed the inexplicably weak and uninspired French army in what was perhaps history’s most one-sided major land engagement.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/black-nfl-player-its-wrong-to-think-jews-are-like-other-w

‘Blacks are wrong to think Jews are like other whites,’ said Pittsburgh Steelers player Zach Banner while blasting Jackson’s anti-Semitic remarks and the deafening silence from fellow professional football players.

Pittsburgh Steelers football player Zach Banner made a hugely powerful statement this week, calling on “my NFL brothers” to join him to support the Jewish community in the wake of an anti-Semitic social media post by another NFL player.

Saying that the anti-Semitic remarks by Philadelphia Eagles player DeSean Jackson had kept him awake, Banner tweeted a message to his fellow players saying, “We must hold each other accountable. We must STAND up and for one another. We must keep our focus on the movement at hand.”

“I’m not going to lie. The lack of empathy from my brothers in the NFLPA (National Football League Players Association) towards the DeSean Jackson situation…and our Jewish friends and fans – most importantly fans and the Jewish community, is…horrendous.” Banner said in a video he posted on Twitter.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/09/where-the-hell-is-john-durham/

Trump has every right to be enraged that four years after Barack Obama’s top henchmen concocted and executed the biggest political scandal of all time, not one person has been held criminally responsible while trials against his associates drag on.

In May 2019, Attorney General William Barr made an announcement millions of Americans had been waiting for: A U.S. attorney outside the Beltway would investigate the corrupt origins of the FBI’s probe into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and government efforts to sabotage the incoming president after he was elected.

For the past 14 months, we have been waiting (impatiently, I confess) for news from John Durham, the Connecticut prosecutor Barr tapped to lead the long-delayed inquiry. After all, by the time the attorney general initiated the targeted probe, there was plenty of evidence of wrongdoing by top officials in the Obama Administration, including James Comey, John Brennan, and Andrew McCabe among others. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had wrapped up his two-year partisan witch hunt and despite unlimited resources—along with the unflinching support of Republicans on Capitol Hill—Barack Obama’s former FBI director could find no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

But Mueller did plenty of damage in the interim. Just weeks after his May 2017 appointment, Mueller started rounding up Trump associates: George Papadopoulos was arrested at Dulles Airport in July 2017 on a concocted charge. A few months later, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, was arrested; Lt. General Michael Flynn finally relented to a plea deal for which he still hasn’t been sentenced. (The judge in the case is refusing to drop the charges against Flynn, per the government’s request.) All that and more happened within the first six months of Mueller’s investigation.

Yet Durham has produced nothing for public consumption.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/woke-protesters-historys-ingredients-riot-revolution/#slide-1

History’s ingredients of riot and revolution

A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said “all lives matter.” In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics.

She won a huge audience, as she intended. But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn’t want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn’t like.

This wouldn’t have been much of a story. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — one that showed her weeping in a near-fetal position.

She fought back tears while complaining about how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social-media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.

The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it. What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting, the threats, and the screaming in the face of police is the schizophrenic behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.

On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their own careers on the Internet pose as vicious Maoists — the hard-core shock troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs, and spray paint.

In homage to Italy’s Blackshirts of the past, they wear black hoodies, don makeshift helmets, and strap on ad hoc protective padding — part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.