RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/12/25/christmas-is-canceled-pro-palestinian-protesters-riot-in-new-york-block-ohare-in-chicago/

Pro-Palestinian protesters spent the weekend rioting, disrupting holiday travel, and targeting Christmas in general in an attempt to force Americans to listen to their concerns by causing them inconveniences, disturbing their holiday plans, and irritating them.

In New York City on Monday, several hundred demonstrators carried a bloodied Nativity scene to Rockefeller Center. Some carried Islamic symbols.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – DECEMBER 25: Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in front of the News Corporation building and near the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and march on 42nd Street, 5th and Park avenues on Monday, December 25, 2023, in New York City. They chant ‘Christmas is canceled’ while carrying blood-red mock Nativity scene through New York City streets. The police arrest several protesters and use force while detaining. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

They attempted to disrupt festivities and later clashed with police.

One man was heard on video evidently shouting “Jew!” at police.

Update: Video emerged of pro-Palestinian activists vandalizing the Union Square Christmas market with anti-Israel graffiti, and even anti-police graffiti familiar from the Black Lives Matter movement:

The New York Post reported:

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters converged on Midtown Monday, lugging a blood-red mock Nativity scene and chanting “Christmas is canceled here.”

“Long live the intifada,” the crowd of about 500 demonstrators yelled, using the Arabic word for “rebellion” or “uprising,” as they mobbed the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree where revelers were enjoying the holiday.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/24/will-the-guardians-of-the-narrative-win/

Much that is happening in the spectacle of America’s legal-political  life today reminds me of some pages in Johan Huizinga’s great book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938). In a chapter on “Play and Law,” Huizinga distinguishes the unfolding of legal proceedings in advanced cultures, where strict adherence to process and abstract notions of right and wrong prevail, from the situation in more primitive cultures, where the ultimate criterion is victory. “Turning our eyes from the administration of justice and highly developed civilizations,” Huizinga writes, “to that which obtains in less advanced phases of culture, we see that the idea of right and wrong, the ethical-juridical conception, comes to be overshadowed by the idea of winning and losing, that is, the purely agonistic conception. It is not so much the abstract question of right and wrong that occupies the archaic mind as the very concrete question of winning or losing.”

In this sense, I submit, Special Counsel Jack Smith, District Judge Tanya Chutkan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the rest of the anti-Trump legal confraternity perfectly epitomize the atavistic persistence of archaic impulses in the law. People like me are always going on about “the rebarbarization of civilization.” The peculiar legal assault against Donald Trump is one instance (among many) of that phenomenon.

It’s been going on for quite a while. The 2020 election, for example, took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

In subsequent months, the public has been treated to an efflorescence of similar and even more extreme anomalies as Donald Trump can barely turn his head without being indicted for something or other. I do not think that the public at large grasps how bizarre the quartet of indictments, proceeding in tandem in four separate jurisdictions, really is. It is unprecedented, yes, but it is also surreal. It is also a travesty of the legal process. The aim is not justice but the grubby partisan goal of removing a popular political rival from the field. The Attorney General of New York, Letitia James actually campaigned on the promise that she would “get Trump.” How is that OK? What has happened is that the law—or, more precisely, the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the law—is simply the weapon of choice, all else having failed. Those who point out that the effort to transform a political rival into a pariah is tantamount to banana republic tactics are right. But to say that is not yet to do justice the breathtaking situation in which a former president who happens to be, by a wide margin, his party’s favorite for the presidential nomination is treated worse than a common criminal. Common criminals, as a rule, are not subject to gag orders for trying to defend themselves.  “Shut up, or you might convince people you are being unfairly persecuted!” What a blow against “Our Democracy™” that would be.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/26/more-bad-news-for-biden-just-34-of-americans-say-theyre-better-off-than-four-years-ago-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite a multi-year campaign by the White House and its allies to convince the public that the economy is booming, the vast majority of Americans say they’re worse off today than they were four years ago. And despite claims that partisanship is driving the public’s sour mood, negative views about the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance are almost universal.

That’s according to the latest I&I/TIPP poll of likely voters, which finds that 58% say they aren’t better off than they were four years ago – before the COVID-19 pandemic – while only 34% say they are.

Meanwhile, a mere 23% of those surveyed say Biden is doing an “excellent” or “good” job handling the economy, including fewer than half of Democrats.

The I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,464 Americans two questions related to the economy: “Comparing your situation today to what it was four years ago, are you better off now than you were four years ago?” and “How would you grade President Biden’s performance handling the economy?” The poll, taken from Nov. 29-Dec. 1, has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

The question about whether people are better off than four years ago – famously asked by Ronald Reagan in 1980 before his landslide election over Jimmy Carter – is clearly weighing on minds at the White House.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/4374248-happy-plessivus-democrats-celebrate-the-holidays-with-separate-but-equal-policies/

For some, it seems, Christmas is so last century, and “Festivus” is so last decade.Happy Plessivus, the new rage in politically correct holiday celebration.

Now, as we approach the 70th anniversary of the rejection of Plessy v. Ferguson and the concept of separate-but-equal with the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many people seem to be embracing racial segregation as a public good.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu offered just such an alternative with a holiday party that excluded guests on the basis of race. Wu was criticized after her staff mistakenly sent the entire city council an invitation to the party at the city-owned Parkman House. However, the invitation told white city council members that they could not attend due to their race.

It was not exactly what most of us think of as being in the spirit of the holidays. Yet, it is precisely what Wu wanted to capture for a racialized holiday theme with a hefty helping of identity politics.

It seems that, today, the three kings would be told by the angel to just drop off the gold, frankincense and myrrh at the door of the stable if they were not the right race.

What was most striking about the controversy is that Wu’s office apologized — but not for the racially exclusive policy. It apologized for sending the invite to white city council members.

Despite the criticism, Wu proudly posted a photo of all the attendees at her “electeds of color” holiday party. Six of the city’s 13 council members are people of color.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/dec/22/move-united-nations-to-gaza/

What a great idea and make John Kerry our ambassador to the UN….rsk

Since the United Nations is anti-American to its rotten core, wouldn’t it be happier somewhere else? The war in Gaza is the perfect opportunity to relocate the world body to a more congenial clime.

Of course, the ideologues masquerading as diplomats will miss the five-star restaurants and high-class hookers they enjoy in Manhattan.

But real estate in Gaza City is dirt cheap, thanks to urban renewal by the Israel Defense Forces. And it would give the U.N. an opportunity to truly express solidarity with its favorite victims. It’s practically part of Hamas as it is.

Don’t misunderstand me. As a connoisseur of hypocrisy, I appreciate the hollow chest-beating that goes on at the whorehouse on the East River.

Where else can we be lectured about human rights by people who treat women as property, on tolerance by states that make antisemitism their official policy, on climate change by nations that make a killing from fossil fuels and on peace by states that subsidize international terrorism?

In the heady days following World War II, America made the tragic mistake of taking the lead in organizing the United Nations. One of the U.N.’s first acts was to approve a partition plan for Palestine, then a British Mandate, which led to the creation of the state of Israel. Now, it is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel.

When the U.N. was established, a majority of its members were Western democracies. Today, the General Assembly is dominated by totalitarian states, theocracies and nations on the brink of extinction due to dramatically declining fertility.

The U.N. has a history of antisemitism stretching back decades. Half of all resolutions passed by the Human Rights Commission target Israel.

While assuring us that gang rape, genital mutilation and baking babies alive are not cool, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres insisted that the Oct. 7 atrocities “did not happen in a vacuum.” In other words, how dare Israel fight for its survival.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/25/2024-the-year-of-our-reckoning/

We should remember the now modern proverb of Nixon-era economic advisor Herb Stein to the effect that what cannot go on (without destroying the nation), simply will not go on.

In some sense, the country for recent years has been cruising on the fumes from prior and likely better wiser generations and institutions. In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.

So next year we will likely see the climax to a number of current dangerous ideas, events, and forces, which finally will either overwhelm us or be addressed and remedied. We live in a Neronian age but can recover if we first understand how we got here and the nature of the suicide we are committing.

In 2023, it became clear, to even the most loyal supporters of the Biden administration, that the U.S. has simply lost or indeed forfeited American deterrence abroad. Our enemies do not fear us; our friends do not trust us; and neutrals do not care either way.

After the 2021 Kabul debacle, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea, many of America’s opportunistic enemies drew conclusions and adopted strategies that would have been previously unthinkable.

Either adversaries will be so emboldened to start regional wars—an impotent Iran now brags it will block the entire Mediterranean—or a United States will be shocked into action and have to deter Iran, the Houthis, and Islamic terrorism, while dealing with an opportunistic China eager to annex Taiwan, and Russia determined to finish off Ukraine.

Those challenges will force the military to staunch its recruitment hemorrhaging, rectify low morale, and rearm. Such rebooting in turn will require discarding the woke agenda, stopping the DEI proselytizing and virtue signaling, and returning to a meritocracy focused on military preparedness and battlefield efficacy.

Since January 2021, the Biden administration has flagrantly and unapologetically dismantled federal immigration law. It destroyed the border as we once knew it. It has already greenlighted more than 8 million illegal entrants—with another quarter-million entering each month.

No one in government has offered any projected costs to states and federal agencies of offering health, food, housing, legal, and education subsidies to millions—who broke the law by entering the U.S. and continue to do violate it while residing unlawfully here. Is that the sign of a promising American citizen—that the first thing he does upon entering America is to break his host’s law?

https://pjmedia.com/victor-davis-hanson/2023/12/22/we-are-well-beyond-hypocrisy-n4924932

The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable.

Impeachment

The Left is saturating the airwaves with outrage over the current House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry. They allege that formally investigating Joe Biden’s role in the family grifting operation is somehow a poor constitutional precedent, if not out-of-bounds entirely.

So we hear further arguments that it will be unwise to impeach a first-term president when he loses his House majority, that there is no reason to “waste” congressional time and effort when Biden will be automatically acquitted in the Democratically controlled Senate, and that the impeachment is cynically timed to synchronize with president’s reelection efforts.

All of these are the precise arguments many of us cited when Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019 (as his reelection campaign began, and immediately after being cleared of the 22-month, $40-million-special-counsel Russian-collusion hoax).

The Democrats tried to remove an elected president over a phone call without a special counsel’s report. So Trump was impeached only after the 2018 election led to a Democratic House majority, which went from eating up nearly two years of his administration in the Russian-collusion hoax straight into the impeachment farce. There was no concern about the cost to the nation of putting an elected government into a continual state of siege.

There is one difference, though, between the Trump impeachment and the Biden impeachment inquiry. Donald Trump was impeached because he accurately accused the members of the Ukrainian government of paying Hunter Biden, with his zero fossil fuel expertise, an astronomical sum to serve on the Burisma board — as the costly quid that earned the lucrative quo from his dad Vice President Joe Biden.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/23/the-road-to-autocracy/

Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism examined the three devastating ideologies that led to the undermining of European democracy in the 1930s. Today, democratic life is also under threat – and there are also three basic forms that this authoritarian threat takes.

The most pervasive comes from the so-called progressive left. The second represents the reactionary response from the right. These two forces are like cats or snakes forced into bags, biting, clawing and spitting at each other.

The most dangerous form of potential autocracy, however, comes not from these extremes, but from the corporate oligarchs. Although they often mimic the cultural memes of the left, the oligarchs, who constitute some of the world’s richest people, certainly do not favour a socialist revolution.

Today, the left revels most in intellectual vandalism, cancelling contrary ideas and shouting down dissenting voices. These ‘progressives’ have achieved virtual control of many key institutions – notably, the education system, the cultural industry and much of the media. In a reversal of traditional roles (once it was the right that tended to advocate censorship), left-wing journalists at places like the New York Times have become the biggest advocates of speech control, as so poignantly revealed in former opinion-section editor James Bennet’s recent exposé in The Economist.

These authoritarian attitudes are increasingly common among Democratic voters, notes a Real Clear Politics survey. Nearly a third of them think that Americans have ‘too much freedom’. This figure is far higher than among either Republicans or independents. And, it seems, education only makes matters worse. Although Ivy League schools have received much condemnation for inculcating these authoritarian attitudes, as Nate Silver points out, they are actually fairly common across all colleges. Universities serve as both the primary incubators and enforcers of ideological conformism. The communities they dominate – such as Boston, Massachusetts – are some of the most intolerant in the US, according to the Atlantic.

Schools like Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania have long harassed and even forced out faculty who deviate from the accepted norms. As many as 20 campuses in the US ask professors to sign a pledge to support the official campus doctrines on ‘diversity’. Presumably this does not mean diversity of opinion. These pledges eerily reprise the ‘loyalty’ oaths of the Cold War era.