RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-desolate-wilderness-thanksgiving-plymouth-pilgrims-nathaniel-morton-william-bradford-11669155132?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

https://amac.us/pelosis-legacy-of-failure-and-political-malfeasance/

Late last week, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi formally announced that she would officially step down from leadership, marking an end to a two-decade reign as the top House Democrat. While elected Democrats and the mainstream media have unsurprisingly heaped praise on the 82-year-old Californian, gushing about the “historic” nature of her speakership, the harsh reality is that Pelosi’s tenure was marked by some of the most disastrous decisions in U.S. history, the radicalization of the Democratic Party, and the degradation of American political culture more broadly.

Pelosi has often said that her entire approach to governance can be summarized by a vital lesson her father taught her in her formative years: “No one is going to give you power. You have to seize it.” From the time she first rose to prominence as the House Minority Leader in 2003, Pelosi has taken that refrain to heart, constantly clawing for as much power as possible. While in the minority, Pelosi had a limited ability to stop Republican legislation. But where she could cause the GOP headaches, she did, including on popular border security and Social Security reform measures.

Democrats finally won back the House majority in 2006, handing Pelosi the Speaker’s gavel for the first time, and she was reelected in 2008. The defining moment of her first tenure as Speaker would come in 2010 with the passage of Obamacare. With large Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, a Democrat in the White House, and a liberal Supreme Court, Pelosi mortgaged the political future of dozens of House Democrats to ram through a gargantuan and deeply unpopular bill that upended the American healthcare system.

In defending the legislation, Pelosi inadvertently let slip one of her most infamous quotes: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” When Americans did find out, they were none too happy, and Democrats lost 63 House seats later that year.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/22/hard-truths-and-radical-possibilities/

The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree. 

Most of us also agree that we want to restore the American founders’ principles and institutions. (I’m setting aside, for now, those on the Right who share our disgust with the woke oligarchy, but who have given up on—or never believed in—republican government, and would prefer something else, like a monarchy.) But how exactly we recover the founders’ constitutionalism is a question no one has been able to answer with any specificity. Any course of action has to be clear about where we are and the challenges we face. The following outline is intended to help us think about these questions. 

Here are the key things that I think are new or different, in some cases fundamentally so. These claims will be unsettling or even upsetting to some readers; but I don’t think they can be dismissed out of hand. At the end, I offer some ideas about what has not changed, which might provide some grounds for optimism. 

I.

Elections—and therefore consent and popular sovereignty—are no longer meaningful.

This is the big one, and in a way, everything flows from it. It is helpful to break it down into two discrete pieces.

First, even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people. 

Set aside for the moment any concerns about outright fraud and ballot tampering. The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century. A clear majority of Americans, including Democrats (at least until recently), has been demanding and voting for comprehensive immigration reform, including strict control of the border, for decades. The Republican establishment in Congress—which made its peace with the deep state some time ago—has made numerous promises to fix this problem, and broken them all, always finding a reason for “amnesty now, enforcement later.” The decision about who gets to be part of the political community was the basic principle of popular sovereignty in the founders’ social compact theory. To the degree that the elites have simply ignored the American people on this point, neither the United States as a nation nor its citizens can still be considered a sovereign people. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-the-gop-can-do-in-a-divided-government/

Now that the Republicans have a slim majority in the House, they need to use all the powers available to them to slow down the Dems’ abuse of power and assault on the Constitution. This means both now and next term,  no “bipartisanship,” no preemptive cringes to ward off media attacks, and no “negotiations,” over raising the debt ceiling, for example, that don’t get some substantive concessions for pruning back the Democrats’ fiscal excesses.

Come January, the most obvious actions are House committee hearings and investigations. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, along with Jim Jordan (Ohio), James Comer (Ky), and other representatives, have already announced possible hearings on numerous issues: the origins of Covid, the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the porous southern border, the politicizing of federal law enforcement, Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme, and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. About the latter, Comer said, “We are going to make it very clear that this is now an investigation of President Biden.”

In addition, the House will have the power to boot Dems from committees, as Speaker-elect Kevin McCarthy has promised. Then there’s the power to pass articles of impeachment, not just of the president, but of officials like AG Merrick Garland, FBI chief Christopher Wray, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, on whose watch nearly four million illegal aliens have crossed the border. Without control of the Senate, however, a conviction is impossible, though the House investigation that precedes the vote on articles of impeachment can be a potent way to consolidate and publicize the administration’s many failures and violations of the Constitution.

More substantial, and politically risky, is exercising the “power of the purse” to slow down the profligate spending that has caused the worst inflation in 40 years. Article 1.7.1. of the Constitution stipulates that “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”

This power given to the House is one of the most consequential checks the Founders created to balance the powers of the Senate and the Executive branches. More important, it is a compensation to the people for the Constitution’s antidemocratic structures. For many Framers, the ancient Athenian  “extreme democracy,” as Aristotle called it, and its demise in the 4th century B.C. epitomized the dangers of popular rule. That ancient history, along with the political, sometimes violent disorder caused by the overly democratic state governments in the decade between the Revolution and the Constitutional convention, made many Founders wary of giving too much direct power to the volatile, uninformed masses.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/violent_crime_comes_to_previously_peaceful_and_safe_marthas_vineyard_and_guess_why.html

The previously unimaginable has happened: The storybook island of Martha’s Vineyard, the seasonal home of billionaires and hundreds of elite cultural and political movers and shakers, not to mention one of three year-round homes of the Obamas, has finally experienced that rarity previously limited to the mainland: violent gun crime. And surprise: The alleged perpetrators are not MAGA white nationalists. Rather, evidence so far points to migrants, possibly of the illegal kind.

This is a bitter pill for most Vineyard residents to swallow. The island’s six towns have all declared themselves to be sanctuary communities. Last September, the island rallied (a.k.a. virtue signaled) around fifty illegal migrants who were flown there at the direction of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – before they were bussed and ferried off the island less than two days later.

A violent wake-up call

Last Thursday, November 17, minutes after it opened for the day, a small bank in the island town of Vineyard Haven was invaded by three armed masked men. They threatened, subdued and duct taped the employees and proceeded to make off in a stolen car with an undetermined amount of cash – after brandishing semiautomatic handguns to intimidate the bank personnel.

Nothing like this crime has ever been seen on Martha’s Vineyard. Previously, the crime rate on the small island off the southern coast of Massachusetts was almost non-existent, confined to things like DUIs and the occasional passing of a bad check. But now, like many other blue communities that have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, things are changing.

Many residents of overwhelmingly Democrat Martha’s Vineyard declare themselves to be “abolitionists” who subscribe to the Critical Race Theory that the U.S. is a racist country that continues to require the abolition of systemic racism.

On the island today – two years after the death of George Floyd and the radical transformations that followed – signs in Vineyard stores, and even a huge permanent banner outside of a private home in Vineyard Haven (clearly in violation of local zoning laws), proclaim “Black Lives Matter” and “Migrants Welcome Here.”

This island-wide welcome mat has resulted in the presence of hundreds if not thousands of migrants who now seem to be close to outnumbering the American citizens – most of them working- or middle-class – who reside year-round on the island. This radical and sudden demographic shift has been largely ignored by the island’s news media.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/are-we-ready-to-abandon-racial-solidarity

Last month, a momentous event took place at the Manhattan Institute: a debate on “The Ethics of Black Identity” with me and Bob Woodson on one side, Shelby Steele and Kmele Foster on the other, and MI President Reihan Salam moderating. At issue was the question of whether the persistence of black identity remains necessary in solving the problems facing black communities today. Bob and I took the affirmative position while Kmele and Shelby took the negative. Reihan had quite a job on his hands, as all four of us debaters are, shall we say, opinionated.

The following excerpt from that debate engages one of the discussion’s through-lines. Collective action served black Americans well in the past. Without racial solidarity founded in institutions like black churches and black community organizations, it’s doubtful that the Civil Rights Movement could have achieved all that it did. Black people, even those who were relatively well-off, were willing to sacrifice money, time, and their very bodies to secure basic rights not only for themselves but for their people.

But has racial solidarity served its purpose? I’ve often argued on behalf of “transracial humanism,” the setting aside of identity categories like race in favor of species-level identification. We’re all human beings, and we should all have the opportunity to lay claim to the fruits of human achievement, whatever their origin. Tolstoy is mine as much as Charles Mingus is mine. Yet I cannot simply define away my blackness. It’s at the core of my self-understanding. To deny it would be to deny myself. And as Bob points out, there are strategic political advantages to calls for racial solidarity, especially when they’ve been nearly monopolized by the Left. (Let me say once more with feeling: My blackness is not in conflict with my conservatism.)

Shelby and Kmele are much more skeptical of the uses of black identity in the present. I believe, with them, that transracial humanism is the way of the future. The question is whether that future has yet arrived.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19151/liberty-worth-the-fight

Aside from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to create an official “Disinformation Governance Board” to “combat” free speech antithetical to the government’s point of view, reports show that DHS employees have regularly met with Facebook and Twitter to suppress and censor certain facts and opinions in online discussion of numerous issues dominating public debate — including such broad topics as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Covid-19, and “racial justice.”

To censor dissenting views on experimental, yet coerced, medical treatments, two-tiered economic shutdowns (during which “Big Box” stores are inexplicably “allowed” to operate while economically vulnerable neighborhood shops are not), is mass censorship in the name of public health, shielding from scrutiny monstrous tyranny draped in the false cloak of the “greater” or “common good.”

Many politicians cavalierly embrace totalitarianism once again. Citizens, once aware of the attendant dangers to peace when large corporations and national governments work hand in glove to push “politically correct” ideas upon society, are apparently so far removed from the twentieth century’s vivid lessons in fascist, communist, and Nazi propaganda that they fail to see the harm in bureaucrats and officeholders dictating to the public what it may believe.

Many Westerners have forgotten that freedom of speech and personal liberty — far from menacing “microaggressions” deserving of sanction — are the surest safety valves for mediating animosities inherent within any society before outright violence is unleashed in their stead.

Governments already acclimated to universal public surveillance and warrantless online tracking see central bank digital currencies, human tracking implants, and the imposition of social credit scores all on the horizon and believe the time for total control over citizens is near, so long as they are the ones doing the controlling.

Their concern is not our personal liberty but their power.

For human freedom to flourish, only the people are capable of keeping government power in check.

It is therefore imperative that Westerners not lose sight of the most important battle already raging — one pitting individual freedom against total state control.

“There comes a time,” Martin Luther King Jr. advised, “when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” Moral imperative, in other words, outweighs personal security, political correctness, and the psychological comfort of identifying with the crowd. During troubling times of human violence and suffering, it is always the lonely few — either blessed with innate courage or made resolute through private, grinding struggle — who dare to take a stand against encroaching evils tacitly accepted by the many. Such is the power of individual free will when man chooses principle as his guide.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/23/fraudulent-illegal-unconstitutional-unconscionable-and-false-a-short-tour-of-government-in-action/

All governments are bad – always necessary, often useful, occasionally better than most, rarely genuinely helpful to all, but still bad.

From Athens to Zaire, from commune to kingdom, from democracy to dictatorship, when people come together to form a society there will always be those who take advantage, who prey, who scheme, who profit from their position.

Every government ever has violated its own laws, flouted its own rules, changed long-standing practices for immediate gain, side-stepped its foundational concepts and strictures, dismissed societal codes of conduct, and ignored the basic ethical standards of humanity.

Here in the United States – which actually has one of the best governmental systems and surely the best foundational governmental theory – we are not immune to these issues.

A necessarily brief – the internet is just not big enough to hold every damning detail – review of even our government practices shows this to be true.

The litany of the unconstitutional manipulation and/or imprisonment of the citizenry runs depressingly long, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the abuses of the Patriot Act, from the Palmer Raids post World War I to the actions of HUAC in the 1950s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/23/voters-show-deep-political-split-over-how-govt-handled-covid-ii-tipp-poll/

America these days has many powerful political disagreements, even for things that, at least superficially, don’t seem to be overtly political. One of them is the government response to the COVID-19 virus outbreak. It has divided the country politically as few other issues in recent years, new I&I/TIPP data show.

Those responding to the latest poll were asked whether the economic lockdowns, public school closures, masking requirements and social restrictions were “necessary or unnecessary to address the COVID virus.”

The majority believe the government’s actions were needed. By 57% to 30%, Americans answered that the COVID restrictions, however draconian and painful, were “necessary” rather than “unnecessary.” Another 13% said they were not sure.

These results emerged from a national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,359 adults, taken from Nov. 2-4. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.8 percentage points.

When you look at the breakdown by political affiliation, the COVID schism clearly comes into view.

Among Democrats, an overwhelming 79% said the COVID lockdown restrictions were necessary, versus just 35% of Republicans. Among independents, 50% said they were needed.

But just 12% of Democrats said they were “unnecessary,” compared to 52% of Republicans and 32% of independents. Only 9% of Democrats were unsure; 13% of Republicans and a sizeable 18% of independents weren’t certain.

So approval of the COVID restrictions appears to have been mostly a Democratic phenomenon.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/ctrlaltdelete_the_totalitarian_state.html

There are three government narratives pushed today that are not real: (1) fraud-free elections, (2) a looming climate apocalypse, and (3) a COVID health emergency requiring total government control.  If you see through only one, then you’re not looking hard enough.  Or as Bill Engvall might say, “If you now believe COVID is mostly a hoax but are still terrified of global warming, here’s your sign.”  Conversely, if you do see through them, you’re likely being censored for expressing those points of view.  

Here’s our impasse: when governments claim to have a monopoly on truth, then citizens are expected to accept preposterous fantasies, no matter how much opposing evidence they might see.  The narrative is absolute.  Dissent is forbidden.  Total obedience is the objective.  Last century, free Westerners understood these features as telltale signs of totalitarianism.  Today, much less free Westerners have been taught to embrace — without scrutiny or wisdom — the government’s fairy tales as part of our required, if not sacred, deference to the bureaucratic State’s cult of expertise.  Whether citizens grasp this shift in individual freedom or not, the general rule handed down from governments is stark yet succinct: ask us no questions, and we will tell you no lies!

Westerners desperately need to reboot their systems of government before those systems of government delete the public’s power to make changes ever again.  It is not possible for political leaders to claim that their countries support personal freedom when they snatch that freedom away at the first sneeze, cow fart, or unapproved tweet.  It is not logical for governments to claim that they protect “democracy” when armies of unelected permanent bureaucrats run the modern State.  It is not reasonable for Western nations to claim that they cherish “free thinking” and “free expression” when their technocratic surveillance arms actively censor speech and promote State-approved points of view over all others.