RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/russell-kirk-american-cicero/

It behooves us to honour the codifiers of conservative core values. Among that pantheon of great thinkers, Kirk’s prodigious output warrants both reflection and genuflection — not least right now in Australia, where what passes for conservativism could use a refresher course in fundamental principles.

Tomorrow, October 19, marks the centenary of the birth of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk (left), who died in 1994. Kirk’s name may not be familiar to many Australians, even to Australian conservatives, but he is uniformly regarded as being the father of modern philosophical American conservatism, revived almost miraculously after World War II at a time of liberal ascendancy.

Kirk stands as a public intellectual (a term often misapplied these days) alongside those two modern British giants of conservative thought, Sir Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott. And he stands beside William F. Buckley Jr as the American most influential in steering conservatism towards modern America and modern America towards conservatism.

Kirk was an historian, a cultural critic, a literary critic, a classics scholar, a Burke scholar, a novelist, an academic, an essayist extraordinaire, a commentator, a fellow traveller with the Southern agrarians. A small town American rural town dweller. A self described (as noted by Kirk’s biographer Bradley Birzer) “gothic romantic” and “Bohemian Tory”. In Scruton’s words, a mind “turned away from the world.” Wishing for an “aristocracy of scholars.” Sounds promising.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/progressive-agony-democrats-brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court/

In the wake of Obama, the Democratic party was a shipwreck, to be saved only by Hillary and the Supreme Court . . .

What has transformed the Democratic party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement? Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.

Obama, the Fallen God

Paradoxically, Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and 2012 and yet helped to erode the old Democratic party in the process. He ended up in opulent retirement while ceding state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court to conservative Republicans.

Obama had promised leftists — in his prior brief tenure in the Senate he had compiled the most partisan record of his 99 colleagues — that his social-justice methods and agendas would lead to a proverbial “permanent Democratic majority.” Do we remember the February 2009 Newsweek obsequious cover story “We Are All Socialists Now”?

Supposedly, changing demography, massive illegal immigration, and identity politics had preordained a permanent 51 percent “Other” whose minority statuses, as defined by gender and race, had now become a majority, given the destined demise of the white working classes. If Obama had not existed, someone like Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Kirsten Gillibrand was supposedly foreordained to be president anyway.

But while Obama sermonized about our predestined “arc of history” and how its moral curve bent this way and that, he managed to lose both his supermajority in the Senate and the House itself by 2011. By 2015, the Senate lost its Democratic majority.

Ruling by pen-and-phone executive order only took the country more leftward. And it came at the price of stagnating the economy, acerbating social, cultural, and racial differences, raising taxes, and recalibrating foreign policy.

Obama bequeathed to his successors neither a popular progressive record nor a robust economy nor a stellar foreign-policy success. If he did ensure massive minority voting registration and bloc voting, that served largely himself — and came at the cost of alienating independents and the working classes. In other words, Obama most certainly did pass on to his successors the downside of his polarizing sermonizing and divisiveness, but not the upside of record minority turnout and uniform voting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-penn-and-the-warren-story-1539798838

Ivy League universities spend a lot of time talking about how much they promote diversity. But numerous Ivy law faculty now insist they didn’t lift a finger to give an edge to a woman claiming to be Native American and in fact didn’t even know she was calling herself a minority. Why not? The academic history of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) doesn’t seem to square with the policies of the universities that employed her.

On Monday Sen. Warren, who used to call herself Cherokee, presented an analysis of her DNA suggesting that she had a Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” Later that day, the Cherokee Nation in Ms. Warren’s home state of Oklahoma rejected this latest effort to justify her claim of Native American status.

One might have expected the senator to simply acknowledge the tribal statement and apologize. But a campaign website is still featuring a story about her “Native American Heritage.” And she’s not the only one who still has a few questions to answer. Her former employers in the Ivy League have offered explanations about her years as a law professor that are hard to reconcile with their schools’ stated efforts to recruit, promote and encourage minority faculty.

Here’s the Monday statement from the Cherokee Nation.:

“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America,” Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. said. “Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

It is hard to see how the senator will be able to stick with her claim of Native American heritage when the relevant tribe has rejected it. Leaders of other federally-recognized Cherokee tribes have been more kind to Ms. Warren in their responses and specifically the chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee has lauded Ms. Warren’s policy work, but none is embracing her DNA claim. According to the Associated Press:

The DNA test that Sen. Elizabeth Warren used to try to rebut the ridicule of President Donald Trump angered some Native Americans, who complained that the genetic analysis cheapens the identities of tribal members with deeper ties to the Indian past… she’s not a member of any tribe, and many Indians take exception to anyone who claims to be part Indian without being enrolled in a tribe, especially for political purposes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/two-minnesota-republican-candidates-assaulted/

Two Republican candidates for state office in Minnesota have been physically assaulted in recent days, leading prominent Republican lawmakers to caution their Democratic colleagues against employing inflammatory rhetoric.

Republican state representative Sarah Anderson was punched in the arm last week after confronting a man who was destroying yard signs promoting Republican candidates.

“It was just insane. He was charging at me, saying, ‘Why don’t you go kill yourself?’” Anderson told the Washington Free Beacon. “To have someone physically coming after you and attacking you is just disheartening.”

Shane Mekeland, a first-time Republican candidate for the state legislature, suffered a concussion over the weekend after he was sucker punched while meeting with constituents at a local restaurant.

“I was so overtaken by surprise and shock, and if this is the new norm, this is not what I signed up for,” said Mekeland, who has suffered from memory loss and sensitivity to light since the incident.

Local police confirmed that a suspect had been identified in connection with both assaults and said charges will likely be filed in the coming days.

The attacks took place days after the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party suspended a communications staffer for one week for writing in a Facebook post that Democrats would “bring [Republicans] to the guillotine” in the coming elections.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/17/carter-page

If you are the karma-believing type, this week is filled with events that should nourish your political soul. A few of the masterminds behind the bogus Trump-Russia collusion tale finally are getting some payback—and one of their targets is going to court to get his reputation back.

Two years ago this week, the Obama Administration’s FBI sought and received an order to spy on Carter Page, a private citizen who briefly volunteered for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. On October 21, 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an application to wiretap the former Naval officer amid suspicions he was a working for Russia and engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities…on behalf of a foreign power.”

Although the information was presented to the secret court as legitimate intelligence from reliable sources, it actually was nothing more than manufactured political dirt on the Trump campaign commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The shady opposition research was produced by Fusion GPS, a consulting firm headed by Glenn Simpson, retained in mid-2016 by the DNC and Clinton team to sabotage Trump’s campaign.

The sketchy allegations about Page’s ties to Russia—contained in the so-called Steele dossier—made several unsubstantiated but explosive claims; it nonetheless was peddled to top law enforcement officials, lawmakers, and journalists as credible material just weeks before the election.

During the same time period, the dossier’s author, ex-British spy turned hired gun Christopher Steele, and Simpson personally were meeting with reporters to seed the story that the Trump campaign nefariously was conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the election. News articles about the FBI’s interest in Page began appearing in the media in late September, and continued until Election Day.

Thus, the Trump-Russia election collusion “crime” was born.

Now, two years later, Page is seeking redemption while the perpetrators of the case against him run for cover. On Monday, Page filed a lawsuit in federal court against the DNC and Perkins Coie, the connected law firm that was the payment conduit between the DNC, Clinton campaign and Fusion. (Law firms are hired in order to circumvent election reporting laws that would reveal which political consulting shops are being paid.) Two Perkins Coie principals are individually named as defendants.

Page’s defamation lawsuit accuses the parties of “directly expos[ing] Dr. Page to public hatred, contempt, ridicule and obloquy, which severely deprived him of public confidence, and injured him severely in all his occupations, and tended to scandalize both his colleagues and friends.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271643/kanye-west-and-fugitive-slave-law-bruce-thornton

After rapper Kanye West’s appearance with Donald Trump at the White House, the progressives unleashed their cable news and twitter bloodhounds to pursue West and drag him back to the Democrat plantation. Commentators who relentlessly police language for racial slurs no matter how barely detectable, suddenly were reveling in old demeaning insults like “minstrel show” and “token,” new ones like “Negro” (which I’m betting few of us know is now a slur), and idiotic ones like being a spokesman for “white supremacy.”

The warning is clear for black dissidents, and has been since the “high-tech lynching” of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose scolding of the Senate Judiciary Committee put it best:

This [hearing] is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

The Thomas hearings in 1991 exposed just how far the once-noble Civil Rights Movement had degenerated into the illiberal identity politics that now defines the Democrat Party, and informs its electoral strategy of bundling various victim-groups into a coalition. While the Civil Rights Movement wanted the nation to honor its classical liberal ideals of inalienable rights like equal opportunity and equal justice, and its Judeo-Christian heritage that a dehumanizing segregation besmirched and betrayed, identity politics scorns those ideals as instruments of an oppressive Western Civilization. Virtues like self-reliance and personal autonomy that racists once claimed to be impossible for black people, are now similarly discarded for being racist excuses for black poverty and social disorder created by systemic “white privilege” and endemic “racism.”

Instead, the federal government became the plantation of the mind, its powers to regulate and redistribute eroding the virtues of self-sufficiency and responsibility, which are the necessary foundations of true freedom. The equality of opportunity became the equality of result, one engineered by federal agencies and policies like affirmative action or minority set-asides or federal dollars promiscuously pumped into black neighborhoods without thought for the moral hazard that accompanied this largess. The consequence, of course, was the dependence that erodes freedom and encodes inferiority. For as the African proverb says, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/cherokee_nation_rains_on_elizabeth_warrens_parade.html

Elizabeth Warren was doing a victory dance about her DNA test showing “strong evidence” she may have 1/1,024 or 0.09 percent Native American lineage. In hot pursuit, she called on President Trump to “pay up” with his $1 million offer to the charity of her choice for taking the DNA test he said he would toss to her at a future presidential debate, earlier. As the network press admiringly gushed about the whole “gotcha,” she was convinced she had him cornered.

Well, sorry – that debate hasn’t happened yet, and now it’s doubtful that it ever will, because Warren is hearing from the leaders of the Cherokee nation.

Here is their astonishing rebuke to her for what they rightly view as a shabby little publicity stunt at their expense:

A Cherokee Nation official rebuked Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts after a DNA test report published Monday asserted there is evidence to “strong support” Warren’s claim to have Native American ancestors.

Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. called the test cited by Warren’s report “useless” in determining tribal citizenship and alleged she was “undermining tribal interests” with her “continued claims of tribal heritage.”

“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America,” Hoskin said in a statement.

“Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong[,]” Hoskin added. “It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its [sic] legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-native-americans-now-1539645420

Any doubt that Elizabeth Warren plans to run for President ended Monday when the Massachusetts Senator released a DNA analysis indicating that she probably does have some trace of distant Native American ancestry.

The former Harvard professor went so far as to unveil a website and video featuring an analysis by Stanford professor Carlos Bustamante, who said that while Ms. Warren is mainly European she likely has some Native American ancestry “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.”

This makes her between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American, which barely spares her the humiliation of not having any after she had listed herself as Native American on federal forms filed by Harvard and Penn law schools where she had worked. On the other hand, she also looks silly for making so much of so little. As Americans are learning as the costs of genetic testing fall, nearly all of us have multiple ethnic and racial backgrounds. Ms. Warren tried to make an identity politics virtue of a genetic banality.

Credit on this point goes to Donald Trump, who mocked Ms. Warren’s genetic boast and no doubt prompted her to get the truth out before the 2020 campaign begins. Ms. Warren now says Mr. Trump should make good on his boast to write a $1 million check to charity if Ms. Warren proved she had Native American blood.

Write the check, Donald. You’ll look gracious, and you’ll have an amusing talking point and photograph that will last the entire 2020 campaign.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-abandon-the-constitution-1539645364

Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has sparked a firestorm of outrage and recrimination on the left. Some attacks seem aimed at intimidating the justices into supporting progressive causes. “The Court must now prove—through its work—that it is worthy of the nation’s trust,” Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, tweeted Oct. 6.

Yet the attacks go beyond ideology. Detractors of Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump are denouncing the Constitution itself and the core elements of America’s governmental structure:

• The Electoral College. Mr. Trump’s opponents claim he is an illegitimate president because Hillary Clinton “won the popular vote.” One commentator even asked “what kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president.” The complaint that the Electoral College is undemocratic is nothing new. The Framers designed it that way. They created a republican form of government, not a pure democracy, and adopted various antimajoritarian measures to keep the “demos” in check.

The Electoral College could be eliminated by amending the Constitution. But proposing an amendment requires two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, and the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the states would have to ratify it.

• The Senate. The complaint here is that the 50 senators who voted in Justice Kavanaugh’s favor “represent” fewer people than the 48 who voted against him. But senators represent states, not people.

Equal Senate representation for the states was a key part of the Connecticut Compromise, along with House seats apportioned by population. The compromise persuaded large and small states alike to accept the new Constitution. It was so fundamental that Article V of the Constitution—which spells out the amendment procedure—provides that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” That means an amendment changing the structure of the Senate would require ratification by all 50 states.

• Judicial independence. Commentators who disapprove of the Supreme Court’s composition have urged, as one law professor put it, “shrinking the power of the courts to overrun our citizens’ democratic decisions.” Some suggest limiting and staggering the justices’ terms so that a vacancy would come up every other year, ensuring that the court follows the election returns. That could be achieved via constitutional amendment, but it would go against the Framers’ wisdom. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, life tenure for judges is “the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws.”

Some of Justice Kavanaugh’s detractors have demanded that if Democrats take the House next month, they open an investigation into the sex-crime allegations Senate Democrats failed to substantiate. But although Congress has wide oversight powers with respect to the executive branch, it has no such oversight authority over the judiciary. The only way the House can legitimately investigate a sitting judge is in an impeachment proceeding.

And Justice Kavanaugh cannot be impeached for conduct before his promotion to the Supreme Court. Article III provides that judges “hold their Offices during good Behavior,” so that a judge can be removed only for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” committed during his term in office. CONTINUE AT SITE