RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/sowing-sixties-winds-reaping-todays-whirlwind-bruce-thornton/

From one perspective, the surreal absurdity of the current protests, vandalism, and riots is not even close to the disruption and mayhem of the political violence in the Sixties and Seventies. We have not yet seen the kidnappings, murders of judges, and scores of bombings that roiled that era. In 1967 alone there were 159 riots, and in the Seventies 14 people were killed and 600 wounded by politically motivated bombings.

But what’s going on today is more dangerous, for the ideologies driving the disorder reflect just how successful the leftist “long march through the institutions” has been at corrupting American education and culture over the last half a century. As a result, ideas and behaviors that by consensus were out of bounds then, have now been normalized and abetted by civic leaders and politicians, as well as popular culture, schools, and even sports.

I spent the Seventies in college and graduate school, so I had a front-row seat for the “long march.” In the early years there were, of course, radical professors who opposed the war in Vietnam and hated free-market capitalism. They preached abandoning the bourgeoisie virtues like self-restraint of desires and appetites, especially of sex. Those virtues were redefined as tools of political oppression. As cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse put it, “The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.”

Such opinions were a minority among an otherwise liberal faculty. But as the decade progressed, they steadily became more mainstream. One reason is that a consumer-driven economy had long found sex to be a great marketing tool, and impulsive behavior to be good for business. And so this corrosive politicizing of promiscuity was promoted by many big businesses.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/i-accuse/#slide-1

Behind indiscriminate claims of racism there is a dangerous propaganda strategy

Cuba’s Communists have long railed against the U.S. embargo. Yet the “blockade,” as they cleverly call it, is the crown jewel of their propaganda strategy — the excuse for all their failures, the justification for every new abuse. In America, progressives have now embraced a similar strategy. The good intentions that originally led them to abandon the Democratic Party’s racist legacy are now obscured by rapid-fire accusations of “racism” targeting anyone who disagrees with them about anything.  

Witness how progressives have manipulated the death of George Floyd. They have blamed President Trump for his killing (which happened in a city controlled at every level by Democrats), have attempted to justify rampant rioting and assaults on police, and are now seeking to defund whole police forces. Not a word about how they and their policies have contributed to the conditions they are protesting. “Black Lives Matter” to them, but not to the point of admitting a mistake of their own. And where anarchy ensues, they will doubtless use that as an excuse to further expand their power. 

One shudders to think what more they might want. The head of the New York City Council’s health committee, Mark Levine, recently declared that any spike in COVID-19 infections arising from the protests is really the fault of “racism.” Over 1,000 health experts signed an open letter declaring that protests against racism “must be supported,” despite the risk of a new spike in COVID-19 infections. They made space to warn that protests for other reasons — particularly protests against their preferred policies — should still be suppressed. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/24/defund_the_thought_police__143523.html

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion, or disagreement. These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities, and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally. Anyone who dares push back, perhaps with a mild tweet saying “All lives matter,” faces immediate censure. If the mob is successful, any offenders will lose their jobs. Feckless employers are all too eager to appease the mob and hope it turns on another target.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control electronic discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news. Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free and open discussion. Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding and better decisions.

The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine applying for a job in Gender Studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, Week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.” Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure in political science, sociology, anthropology, or history. Bad career move. There is more robust political debate at the Academy Awards.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/protests-urban-chaos-americans-will-seek-to-avoid-big-cities/

 I n Aesop’s Fables and Horace’s Satires a common classical allegory is variously retold about the country mouse and his sophisticated urban cousin.

The city-slicker mouse first visits his rustic cousin’s simple rural hole and is quickly bored and unimpressed by both the calm and the simple fare.

When the roles are soon reversed, the country cousin at first is delighted by big-city mouse’s sumptuous urban food scraps and the majestic halls where they may scuttle about. But as the crafty clawed house cat and sharp-toothed guard dogs threaten both, and the noise and bustle mount, the stressed-out country mouse scampers home — at last realizing that his unappreciated quiet and safe abode trump action and sophistication every time.

These Greek and Roman fables reflect the classical world’s paradox of not particularly enjoying life in the fetid, plague-ridden, and dangerous big cities of Athens, Rome, and Alexandria that nevertheless gave the world Socrates, Virgil, and magnificent libraries. As towns grew into metropolises, their sheen as heady places for art, literature, and cultural change began to fade. In response, the once commonplace farm and distant town were increasingly romanticized, especially in such genres as pastoralism and bucolic poetry. The escape to the country estate was the ideal of the Roman senator, the same way that the “ranch” sometimes becomes the getaway from the Washington swamp for American presidents.

Originally, city man was “astute” (asteios/astu: town)  and country man a rustic agroikos or bumpkin (argoikos/agros: farm). But it was not such a simple dichotomy, as even today “urbane” is not always an unqualified compliment, and “rustic” is sometimes a grudging commendation of authenticity.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/22/the-con-of-the-surrender-cons/

The column, written in the heated aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, sounded like a typical anti-American screed published in the New York Times or posted on MSNBC.

“Racism in America is a fatal wound,” the author lamented. “Every time another incident occurs we put a Band-Aid on it, but the Band-Aid keeps falling off. Band-Aids are not enough to ever stitch this country back together.”

She went on: “Nothing can bring George Floyd back to life. But if his horrific and needless death proves to be a turning point to make Americans finally end the ugly racism that stains our nation’s history and afflicts us like a cancer of the soul, he will leave behind a legacy we sorely need.”

That inflammatory, crude condemnation of America—not to mention the glorification of Floyd, a man with a criminal record who was doped up on drugs and committing another crime when the fatal encounter occurred—was made by Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation. James, the first woman and first African American to head the conservative think tank, like so many on the performative Right, jumped on the Left’s latest anti-America crusade while betraying the constituency her organization purports to represent.

Embracing the Left’s Language

It is a reflex, unfortunately, that’s commonplace on the establishment Right, an infuriating capitulation to our country’s most insidious foes. The Left intends to destroy the nation and use race as the carpet-bomb—and that approach is working even as blacks continue to make solid economic, occupational, and educational gains.

So, what was James’s point? There is no evidence Floyd’s death had anything to do with race. One incident, or even a random handful, hardly proves her diagnosis that racism is a “fatal wound” to America. The unfolding mayhem and chaos that followed Floyd’s death would have been a perfect opportunity for James to explain why conservatives, not radicals on the Left, have better solutions to improve the lives of all minorities. James, after all, has a triumphant personal story of her own; her success is a testament to our country’s unparalleled progress on matters of race and equality.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/appetite_for_destruction_lincoln_grant_churchill_statues_coming_down_lenin_going_up.html

Statues and monuments to some of the most important Western historical figures of all time have been summarily defaced and destroyed in recent weeks, including those of Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill. None of these figures had a damn thing to do with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone because the wanton destruction of symbols of the West’s past has nothing to do with the killing of Floyd, either.

 Columbus “discovered” the New World and died well over 100 years before the first slave ship came from Africa to America. Washington was one of the most principled men who ever lived and was “The Father” of the country that has done more to advance human freedom than any other. Lincoln saved that country while freeing the slaves. He directed a war effort that saw nearly 350,000 union troops die…in part to put an end to slavery – and died a martyr himself. Grant defeated the Confederacy, trashed the Ku Klux Klan and fought to protect the newly won rights of black people in the years after the war. Churchill stood alone in the West against the Third Reich and its NAZIs for over 17 consecutive months.

So what is the orgy of anarchy and destruction about? It is nothing short of a planned assault on the West and the values it used to hold so dear. It is a Marxist insurrection hoping to bring about the end of the U.S.—and the West—as we knew it. It is anti-capitalist, anti-rule of law, anti-Christian and anti-freedom. The leaders of Antifa and BLM have openly admitted this. Even if they hadn’t, it is abundantly clear to see for any sentient being connecting the dots. It is also utterly racist, classist and intolerant.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teddy-roosevelt-gets-canceled-11592867171?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The Committee for the Removal of Public Monuments has bagged its biggest trophy to date. On Sunday New York Mayor Bill de Blasio acceded to a request from Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, to remove the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, that fronts the museum entrance on Central Park West.

“The Statue has long been controversial because of the hierarchical composition that places one figure on horseback and the others walking alongside, and many of us find its depictions of the Native American and African figures and their placement in the monument racist,” Ms. Futter wrote in a letter to the mayor. She added, “While the Statue is owned by the City, the Museum recognizes the importance of taking a position at this time. We believe that the Statue should no longer remain and have requested that it be moved.”

The Roosevelt statue has long been a target for progressives. Last year the museum organized an exhibition, “Addressing the Statue,” which did a poor job of exploring the issues involved. As our critic Edward Rothstein wrote at the time, “[T]he exhibition actually does very little to help explain the statue or to put it in context. And while it claims to want to participate in a ‘national conversation’ by presenting a variety of views, its own weigh down the scales.”

This current anti-monument wave degrades what originated as a legitimate grievance: the presence of Confederate monuments, many erected during the Jim Crow era to perpetuate the Lost Cause myth and advance white supremacy. But that idea has been taken over now by what has turned into a mob intent on willy-nilly eradication of chunks of American history.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/statues-and-limitations/

Spasmodic attempts to remake the world invariably involve the throwing out of the good along with the bad. Our ongoing bout of statuary iconoclasm has proven no exception.

The list of figures whose likenesses have been defaced now includes Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Cervantes, Robert the Bruce, Voltaire, General Schuyler, the abolitionist Mathias Baldwin, and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. One can only imagine the philosophy that could draw a line around as motley a crew as that.

Of course, no such philosophy exists — and nor will it. Rather, we find ourselves in the middle stages of a cultural riot in which everything — and everyone — has become fair game. What do Cervantes and Stevie Ray Vaughan have in common? Well, that they are both made of bronze, and are thus liable to make a sickening thud when pulled by force from their pedestals. The violence, to borrow a fashionable phrase, is the point.

But it is not acceptable. Irrespective of the nature of their grievance — or of the strength of the feeling undergirding it — violent mobs can’t make decisions on behalf of everyone else.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-dont-matter-to-black-lives-matter_3397428.html#

In case you missed it, and you could have considering the endless thumb sucking regarding just how many came or didn’t to the Trump rally in Tulsa, 60 were shot, 9 fatally, at last count, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago.

These included a 13-year old girl in the Austin neighborhood of the West Side, Two hours earlier, in the same area, someone pulled up alongside a Blue Honda in an SUV and fired several rounds at the driver, striking and killing his three-year old son.

Similar carnage occurred in Chi-town only a couple of weeks before over Memorial Day weekend when 39 were wounded and 10 died, including a 16-year old boy.

And then of course we have Minneapolis, where most of the recent contretemps began, where last night 1 died and 11 were wounded in a shooting spree.

All of this was black on black violence of the most tragic sort.

Where was Black Lives Matter? Nowhere to be found, since the cops didn’t do any of it. BLM doesn’t seem to care about violence done to blacks if the police are not involved, even though black on black is by many multiples more lethal and more common, resulting in exponentially more black casualties.

BLM’s primary interest appears to be smashing the state, creating revolution with their pals in Antifa in order to take power themselves.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-with-all-thy-faults/91170/

President Trump no doubt speaks for millions of New Yorkers and other Americans when he protests the decision to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the Museum of Natural History. He calls the decision “ridiculous.” There are serious differing views. Ours is that it’s a sad day for those who thrill to the spirit of liberalism in our city and the inclusive Americanism for which Roosevelt stood during his heroic life.

The museum is trying to cast its decision as being animated by something other than disapproval for Roosevelt himself. The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, is insisting to the Times that its decision to remove the monument “is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition that’s depicted in it.” She is referring to the Native American man and African man on either side of TR and the steed on which he is mounted.

We, for one, find that distinction unconvincing, even if art is in the eye of the beholder. The protesters who forced the museum’s hand hate Roosevelt as much as his statue. The sculptor himself, James Earle Fraser, intended the two figures beside TR to symbolize “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.” Roosevelt mightn’t pass muster with today’s protesters, but in his own time, he was a progressive.