RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/census-states-migration-population-california-new-york-c6553426?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The migrant border mess is benefiting progressive states like New York, California and Illinois in one respect: It’s offsetting some of their population loss from droves of taxpayers fleeing to lower-cost and low-tax states. That’s one lesson from new Census Bureau state population data released this week.

The U.S. population increased by 1.6 million between July 2022 and July 2023, with states in the South accounting for about 1.4 million of the growth. Leading the boom were Texas (473,453), Florida (365,205), Georgia (116,077), South Carolina (90,600) and Tennessee (77,512). Driving their growth was migration from other states.

Eight states saw population declines, with the biggest in New York (-101,984), California (-75,423) and Illinois (-32,826). They can blame population flight. California lost the most residents to other states (-338,371), followed by New York (-216,778), Illinois (-83,839), New Jersey (-44,666), Massachusetts (-39,149) and Maryland (-30,905).

You don’t need artificial intelligence to spot what these states have in common: High taxes, burdensome business regulation and inflated energy and housing prices. Most donor states also have higher than average unemployment as a result of businesses moving or expanding their workforces in other states. California and New Jersey have both had significant increases in unemployment over the last year.

An interesting natural experiment has been Washington state, which gained tens of thousands of people from other states on net each year in the last decade. But since enacting a 7% capital-gains tax on higher earners in 2021, Washington has been losing residents to other states at an accelerating pace—15,276 this past year. Could that be a reason, or is Seattle’s crime problem a better explanation?

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has seen rapid change, driven by new inventions, most for the better. My grandparents grew up before cars, washing machines, airplanes, or telephones. My parents grew up before radios, jet planes, atom bombs, or Social Security. I grew up without television, computers, microwave ovens, seat belts, and even before zip codes and valium. My children grew up without cell phones, the internet, Sony PlayStations, DVDs, e-mail, or social media.

Are we better off for these inventions? Yes, most have enhanced our lives, and the world is thankful that it was America, not the Nazis, that first produced the atom bomb. Technological advances have freed up time, made jobs safer, improved living standards, and made lives more comfortable. But are we happy? Again, yes; according to Gallup, Americans are generally satisfied with their lives.

Nevertheless, as time rushes by I think of what my grandchildren will never experience: gliding through the park on strapped-on roller skates, rolling up a car window, or emptying an ice tray. They will never use a fountain pen, type a letter on a Smith-Corona, or open a can of peas. They will never play tennis with a wooden racquet, lace a pair of ski boots, or float off on an inner tube. They will never call a friend on a dial phone, pay a bill with Travelers Checks, or read a roadmap. They will never have to get up to change the TV channel, or handle carbon paper. They may never read a print newspaper, use a handkerchief, or mess with a window air-conditioning unit. And their children may never have to pump gas!

Will they miss what they don’t know? Probably not. Do you miss skis with long thongs, tire chains when roads are snow covered, shoveling coal, or using the choke to give your car the proper fuel-air mixture?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20243/cause-of-america

Our nation’s founding fathers made the separation of church and state one of the pillars of this republic, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t religious.

On the contrary.

They profoundly believed in God, and through their writings made repeated references to their faith and America’s unique place among nations based on that faith. Among those individuals was Thomas Paine who, in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” wrote, “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind.” He would tell his fellow citizens confronting the imperial rule of England, “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

America’s first president also embraced his religion. In his farewell address, George Washington reminded his audience, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

This embrace of faith is not unique to our national leaders of the 1700s. Historian Gary Scott Smith wrote that President Ronald Reagan “firmly believed and often declared that God intended America to be a beacon of hope, faith, freedom, and democracy — ‘a city on the hill.'”

As we celebrate this holiday season it is crucial that we reflect on a nation whose motto, “In God we trust” reveals a foundation of morality, ethics and virtue. It does not matter which religion you embrace. These are basic founding principles of a nation that remains humanity’s last best hope and whose citizens are bound together under these shared values. It is easy to lose sight of that fact amidst the political rancor and partisan divides that currently distract us.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/20/a-judicial-insurrection-against-democracy/

We didn’t need further proof that Trump Derangement Syndrome poses a graver threat to American democracy than Donald Trump himself, but we have it. The decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to disqualify Trump from holding office is the anti-Trumpists’ most egregious assault on democracy yet. It shows once again how willing they are to use the tactics of the banana republic, the sly schemes of a tinpot state, to take down a politician they love to loathe. ‘We are defending democracy’, they say, as they beat it to a pulp.

The Colorado justices – every one of whom was appointed by a Democratic governor – ruled four to three that Trump is ‘disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment’. The 14th is a post-Civil War amendment that forbids ‘insurrectionists’ from holding office. It was designed to keep unrepentant Confederates, men who had dragged the republic to war, away from seats of power. Trump’s supposed stirring-up of the boneheads and blowhards who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was an insurrection too, the justices decreed, and thus his name must be scrubbed from ballot papers across the state of Colorado.

First things first. The idea that the idiots who ran riot at the Capitol on 6 January are in any way comparable to a Confederacy of seven slave states that illegally broke from the American republic is unhinged. It is a testament to the historical illiteracy of the Democratic establishment that it would even hint at a likeness between men who caused a war that killed hundreds of thousands and Trumpists taking selfies in Congress during a conflagration that led to five deaths (three from natural causes). Not content with hysterically referring to 6 January as a domestic 9/11, now they’re implying it was a Civil War-level rupture. And this is leaving to one side the contested idea that Trump incited 6 January.

This is the first time a presidential candidate has been deemed unfit for election under the constitutional ban on insurrectionists. The impact of the ruling will be dire. If it holds – and it very well might not – it means Trump will be absent from presidential primary ballots in Colorado, meaning no one in the state could vote for him to be the GOP’s 2024 candidate. Hard luck Coloradans who want Trump back in the White House – your democratic right to elect him has been stolen from you by judges. Beyond the primaries, the court ruling would ‘probably also affect Trump’s status for the 5 November General Election’, says the Guardian. That is, if the ruling holds, Trump could be blocked from standing in Colorado even if he is freely selected as the Republicans’ presidential candidate in other states.

https://victorhanson.com/humpty-dumpty-america-or-how-did-we-suddenly-fall-apart-part-three-the-symptoms/

Foreign Policy

There have been plenty of foreign policy disasters over the last 60 years since the Vietnam Era. But even in our failures, there was no inherent intent to destroy ourselves and to deliberately harm efforts to improve our security and stature overseas.

Not now.

Why are we experiencing one of the worst military recruitment crises of the last half-century? Why did we drive out over 8,000 of our most experienced soldiers for not being vaxxed, the majority with acquired immunity from prior Covid-19 bouts?

Why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs proud that he had called his Chinese counterpart to warn him of the supposed volatility of his own American Commander-in-Chief? Why did General Milley and Secretary of Defense Austin promise Congress to chase unicorns of “white rage” and “white privilege,” without any supporting documentation of systemic racial discrimination in the ranks? Were they unhappy that white males died at twice their population proportion in our recent optional wars abroad?

Did they think all their virtue-signaling would increase recruitment, end internal dissension, and improve morale in the ranks?

If someone wished to humiliate and destroy the prestige of the United States, erode our deterrence, and greenlight anti-American aggression, he could not have done any better than the architects of the 2021 Afghanistan flight.

How did the U.S. manage to become so arrogant and impotent all at once?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/21/judge-orders-removal-of-historic-confederate-monument-in-arlington-cemetery/

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Biden Administration’s efforts to remove an iconic Confederate monument from Arlington National Cemetery, despite efforts to preserve it.

As reported by ABC News, the removal of the monument was originally ordered by the Biden Administration’s “Naming Commission,” a partisan group dedicated to the renaming or removal of everything related to the Confederacy in the United States. Having previously ordered the renaming of many military bases, including the renowned Fort Bragg, the commission ordered the removal of the Confederate monument in Arlington Cemetery, which is surrounded by the graves of Confederate soldiers, as well as the grave of the monument’s sculptor, Moses Ezekiel.

After efforts by several heritage groups, including Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage, the attempted removal of the monument was blocked by U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston on Monday over concerns that the removal would desecrate the surrounding graves. He thus ordered that the government was temporarily prohibited “from taking any acts to deconstruct, tear down, remove, or alter the object of this case — the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the surrounding gravesites — pending further action of this Court.”

However, Alston later determined that “Plaintiffs have not alleged facts that support the premise that Defendants intend to “destroy” rather than “remove” the Memorial.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fetterman-i-didnt-leave-the-left-it-left-me/

An interesting line with a lot of history to it from Sen. Jon Fetterman on dumping the “progressive” label he used to use.

“I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.”

President Reagan would often quip, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Similar lines have been used by everyone from Bill Maher, “It’s not me who’s changed, it is the left” to Elon Musk.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on with Fetterman after his medical issues, but a dividing line seems to have been the Left’s support for Hamas, but he’s also embraced a species of economic populism, fighting against land sales to China, and Japan’s takeover of U.S. Steel.

While Fetterman had never been a foreign policy guy, he did explicitly break with the far left on Israel during his campaign.

“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he added. “Our campaign is based on core Democratic values and principles, and always has been, and there is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.”

Still, Fetterman said he was “eager to affirm” his positions on the record, lest there be any uncertainty among supporters of Israel who have similar questions. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear,” he told JI, “that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party.”

The Left did not take that seriously and assumed he was just pandering. Now they’re finding out that he really meant it.

So this did not come out of nowhere. And it’s not just about Israel.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/christmas-in-a-time-of-war

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

EXCERPT:

Hamas’s barbarism, by contrast, is motivated by religious conviction—warped religious conviction, to be sure; false religious conviction, undoubtedly; but religious conviction, nonetheless. Yes, Hamas has a political program, and its slogan, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” is as despicable a euphemism for exterminationist anti-Semitism as was the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to Die Judenfrage (the “Jewish Question”). But what turns people into deranged Hamas murderers and “martyrs,” who by all accounts enjoyed killing 1,400 innocents on 10/7, is the vile belief that what they were doing was the will of God.

It was not; it could not be. Only a fundamentally distorted understanding of “God” could lead to such a wicked conclusion. The God of the Bible cannot command the murder he forbade in the Ten Commandments, because the God of the Bible is a God of reason, and reason cannot contradict itself. The God of the Qur’an, however, is a God of will, who can command whatever he chooses and demand submission to that command as the ticket to salvation. Taken to extremes, that false idea of God as Absolute Willfulness is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah, and their exterminationist anti-Semitism possible, and what gives these hopeless political movements their staying power.