RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/if-it-aint-woke-dont-fix-it/

To hear the radical left tell it, America is broken beyond repair.  It must be torn down and rebuilt — “fixed” to the radical left’s specifications.  Following this slanted subjectivism has turned countless American institutions into caricatures. 

Like so many monsters stitched and bolted together by Frankenstein, these once-healthy institutions now lurch stiff-legged before us — and always ever more leftward.  Among them, none stands out more monstrously now than America’s self-proclaimed “elite” colleges. 

The list of the left’s demands is as endless as its proposals are preposterous. 

They demand an open border policy because they claim enforcing national sovereignty is racist.  They demand sanctuary cities because they claim it is racist to not encourage illegal immigration.  Police departments should be defunded because they claim enforcing the law is racist — ditto prosecuting those apprehended in breaking it — despite minorities being the greatest victims of these policies. 

When it comes to schools, they oppose standardized testing and advanced placement courses because they deem these too to be racist, and they oppose school choice because, in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, these are “undermining democracy.”

These radical demands and more have penetrated corporations, sports, establishment media, and entertainment.  The Biden administration’s capitulation to the left’s environmentalism is a case in point. 

On Earth Day, it heralded a grant competition for $7 billion to go to 900,000 low-income families for solar panels: that comes to about $7,800 per house.   If that $7 billion figure sounds familiar it should; it almost exactly matches the $7.5 billion the administration asked Congress for in 2021 for EV charger installation. As of December 2023, not one had been built; by the end of March 2024, only seven had. 

Yet no place has allowed itself to be rebuilt with greater abandon than the campuses of America’s self-styled elite institutions of higher education.  Grotesque anti-Semitism has been retooled into pro-Palestinian “progressivism” by the left.  Their calls for the destruction of Israel have always rested on the preposterous proposition that this somehow did not include those who inhabit it. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/everyone-gets-a-trophy-and-no-trophy-is-worth-anything-c03f351f?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 Americans this month. I wish he had cut the list down to two or three. Perusing the list of winners I note, along with a preponderance of Democratic politicians, the heavy hand of diversity at work, making certain that among the winners are included a sufficient number of women, African-Americans, Hispanics and even a Republican (Elizabeth Dole).

The result of so many medal winners is to diminish, if not altogether destroy, the cachet the honor once held. Another once-vaunted prize bites the dust.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom joins the Nobel Prize for Literature, which long ago lost its luster. When it went to Bob Dylan in 2016, what prestige remained was all but blown away. His songs have nothing to do with literature, and most, in any case, are derived from Woody Guthrie. I await the day the Swedish Academy decides to recognize that notable speed typist Joyce Carol Oates, which ought to finish the prize off completely.

The Pulitzer Prizes in the arts haven’t done much better. Some years ago in the London Times Literary Supplement, I noted that these awards seem to go to two kinds of people: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. In 1998, when Katharine Graham won a Pulitzer for her autobiography, Hilton Kramer noted that she qualified on both grounds. The prize’s prestige has also all but evaporated.

Then there are honorary degrees, which long ago lost their honor. Universities often give them to the wealthy, hoping the recipients will make handsome financial contributions. My friend Sol Linowitz told me he collected 63 such degrees while chairman of Xerox. The thick-fingered hand of diversity is felt here, too. Good luck finding a list of honorary degrees these days that doesn’t include at least two African-American women.

The National Book Award, especially for novelists, once had great prestige. To win one meant that a novelist had truly arrived—or so Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Philip Roth and other novelists of that era must have felt. Today you’d be hard-pressed to name any novelist who has won a National Book Award in the past decade, which may have something to do with the loss of interest in the contemporary novel generally.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-heart-of-alvin-braggs-case-against-trump/

Porn star Stormy Daniels says she had sex with former President Donald Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel in July 2006. To keep her from telling that story, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen says, “the boss” instructed him to pay Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says that nondisclosure agreement was a serious crime that undermined democracy by concealing information from voters. Of these three accounts, Bragg’s is the least credible.

“This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said at the beginning of Trump’s trial last month. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

Contrary to Colangelo’s spin, there is nothing “pure and simple” about the case against Trump. To begin with, Trump is not charged with “conspiracy” or “election fraud.” He is charged with violating a New York law against “falsifying business records” with “intent to defraud.”

Trump allegedly did that 34 times by disguising his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen’s payment to Daniels as compensation for legal services. The counts include 11 invoices from Cohen, 11 corresponding checks and 12 ledger entries.

Falsifying business records, ordinarily a misdemeanor, becomes a felony when the defendant’s “intent to defraud” includes an intent to conceal “another crime.” Bragg says Trump had such an intent.

What crime did Trump allegedly try to conceal? Prosecutors say it was a violation of an obscure New York law that makes it a misdemeanor for “two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-landmark-on-the-road-to-decline/

The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.

We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.

The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”

“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers

And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.