RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/05/democrats-hypocrisy-on-political-violence-runs-deep/

There is a reason Republicans don’t wear t-shirts emblazoned with the image of Augusto Pinochet, but Democrats do wear shirts emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara.

After the Civil War, the Democratic Party (with the notable exception of the Ku Klux Klan) had renounced employing domestic terrorism, armed insurrection, and political violence as tools for advancing their agenda. This nearly unanimous bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats prevailed for around 100 years, throughout syndicalists and anarchists bombings and assassinations, including of President William McKinley. It prevailed up through the Puerto Rican nationalists’ 1950 assassination attempt on President Harry Truman, which claimed the life of White House Police Officer Leslie Coffelt; and the 1954 attack in the U.S. House Chamber, which wounded five representatives, including the Hon. Alvin Barkley (R-Mich.).

In each instance, the overwhelming majority of the country supported the convictions under law of these terrorists. And, of course, the same was true with regard to the perpetrators of the political violence that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy brothers.

But as the Baby Boomers came of age and the Vietnam War raged, the consensus regarding political violence, armed insurrection, and domestic terrorism began to change. While the overwhelming majority of anti-war protestors were non-violent, there emerged a group of leftist domestic terrorists and violent insurrectionists—many of them the privileged spawn of well-to-do parents—bent upon the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, which they deemed a fascistic, imperialistic empire. 

https://justthenews.com/government/security/evidence-pre-planned-capitol-attack-grows-experts-say-case-weakens-tying-trump

Growing evidence of advance planning and coordination of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol undermines claims that the rioters were responding spontaneously to former President Trump’s speech to supporters about a mile and a half away, according to legal and intelligence experts.

As Senate Democrats mull their options for convicting or censuring Trump and banning him from future public office for allegedly inciting insurrection, experts said their incitement case against him was dealt a severe blow this week when federal prosecutors charged three men in the Capitol attack, alleging their communication and coordination dated back to November. 

For speech to meet the threshold of incitement, a speaker must, first, indicate a desire for violence and, second, demonstrate a capability or reasonable indication of capability to carry out the violence, according to Kevin Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI.

In Trump’s case, Brock said, there were neither.

In an interview Thursday, Brock told Just the News he listened to Trump’s entire Jan. 6 speech. “I didn’t hear a single word about — or anything that would trigger a reasonable person to believe that he was inciting— violence,” he said. “He even used the words ‘peaceful’ and ‘respectful.'”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

We’re barely a week into the Biden presidency, and it’s been a literal blizzard of Executive Orders, so many that nobody can even keep up with them. Trying to review them in at least a general way, I can’t find a single one that is a good idea. They range from bad to catastrophic.

The overall summary is that the dopes have taken full control. All adult supervision has now been banished from the vast federal government, and the wokest (and stupidest) of the woke progressives are to have the full run of the place. Resources are now infinite, tradeoffs among competing priorities are no longer necessary, and all human problems are to be solved and perfect fairness and justice instituted within a matter of weeks if not days. Best of all, the Bidenistas think that all this will work because they are so “smart.”

At Jacobin magazine, writer David Sirota captures the spirit of the moment in a piece titled “There’s Really No Need to Compromise, Joe.” The specific focus of the piece is advocating for immediate legislation to pass out checks for $2000 each— as opposed to any smaller amount — to most every American. But the bigger theme is that compromise is not needed because now there are no more limits on how much money the federal government can pass out, nor is there any cost or other downside to just throwing out money as fast as possible. The route to improving your and everyone else’s life is endless big handouts of free money from the Feds:

https://spectator.us/topic/oligarchy-america-rome-athens-jeff-bezos/

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.

Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, Oligarchy in America the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.

Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/anti-trump-reprisals-matthew-vadum/

As Joe Biden, an illegitimate president, was sworn in at a funereal inauguration ceremony surrounded by thousands of U.S. troops, Democrats were busy plotting and scheming and planning reprisals against Republicans for doing nothing other than supporting his duly elected predecessor.

These anti-democratic Democrats have been driven to utter madness by the events of January 6 even though what happened that day does not compare with the months of Antifa and Black Lives Matter murdering people and burning down cities to protest the Fentanyl-caused death in police custody of George Floyd, a drug-addicted career criminal who resisted arrest.

Even the claim that five people were killed January 6 is a lie that the Left is using as propaganda against Orange Man Bad and his backers.

Three of the people –Trump supporters— who died during or after the rally died of medical emergencies.

Kevin Greeson, 55, from Alabama, who had high blood pressure, experienced a heart attack “in the midst of the excitement,” his family said. Benjamin Phillips, 50, from Pennsylvania, had a stroke. Media reports indicate Roseanne Boyland, 34, from Georgia, was trampled by the mob but it is unclear what actually happened. A purportedly authentic redacted police incident report in case #21002749 states that Boyland “was witnessed to collapse during the protest demonstrations at about 1700 hours. … Despite all lifesaving efforts, SUB-1 died and was pronounced dead by Dr. Pyle at 1809 hours.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/thank-you-mr-president-john-perazzo/

As America says goodbye to President Trump, Democrats are doing what they do best: pushing forward, to the very last moment, with their four-year crusade to discredit, smear, and punish one of history’s truly great presidents. Having never given Mr. Trump so much as a moment of respite from their relentless torrent of defamatory lies, they have firmly secured their place in history as the pettiest, most lawless tyrants ever to defile our nation’s political landscape. Thus, it remains for the many millions of Americans who, with sober hearts and minds, are able to discern the monumental good that this president has done for the United States, to lay bare the magnitude of his accomplishments. Toward that end, let us examine his remarkable record.    

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/19/dont-call-bidens-plan-stimulus-its-just-another-keynesian-fantasy/

Joe Biden’s promised stimulus is meant to boost an economy devastated by the Democrats’ national shutdown by handing out more checks and imposing a $15 national minimum wage. Sorry, it won’t work.

“We must act now, and we must act decisively,” Biden said.

Sounds good, but do we really? What he and Congress have proposed is an incoherent mess that will do the precise opposite of what he says it will. Even worse, it’s premised on the long-discredited idea that the government can stimulate the economy by spending more.

From false premises come bad policies that will hurt many low-income people and possibly end the Trump recovery now under way. And, make no mistake, Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan unveiled late last week contained a panoply of bad policies.

In a recent piece, the Foundation for Economic Education listed the bill’s main provisions:

An additional $1,400 in “stimulus” checks sent to most Americans, raising the recently passed $600 payouts to $2,000.
Renewal and increase of the expanded unemployment benefits that extend payouts to many new classes of workers through September 2021. Biden’s proposal would add $400 a week in federal payouts on top of existing state-level benefits.
Expansion of the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
An increase in food stamp benefits.
A nationwide $15 minimum wage.
Extension of the federal government’s eviction moratorium.
$350 billion for local, state, and tribal governments.
$160 billion for vaccine distribution and other COVID-19 health measures.
Paid leave for millions of workers, much of which would be funded by taxpayers.

“It is $1.9 trillion, and it’s basically the Bernie Sanders wish list of spending on massive blue state bailouts,” including “$100 billion for schools, even though schools have been shut down for the last year,” said former Trump economic adviser Steve Moore.

https://spectator.org/capitol-riot-fuhgeddaboudism/

“People forever mired in an imaginary future when they redeem humanity through the power of their ideas naturally do not possess the time for the very real past in which the power of their ideas looted an immigrant’s American Dream, murdered a retired elderly African American policeman guarding a friend’s property, and torched businesses already burned by lockdowns — and then called it “social justice.” This happened. This happened recently. Should we all pretend it didn’t? And should people not bothered by any of that deliver gaslighting moral lectures about whataboutism to all the normal people horrified by all of it?”

“This was all orchestrated by this president who gave them their marching orders,” Al Sharpton told MSNBC viewers this week about the Unquiet Riot on Capitol Hill. Neither Freddy nor the seven customers who stayed in his “fashion mart” after closing were available for comment.

Inciting a riot does not serve as a prerequisite for gaining on-air employment at MSNBC. But it’s not a disqualifier.

Fuhgeddaboudism demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

Sharpton, who announced, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” before an armed man shot customers in Freddy’s Fashion Mart and torched it with people still inside in 1995, knows something about incitement (and mucking up facts, as the African American owners, not Freddy, aimed to move a black-owned record store).

“If the Jews want to get it on,” Sharpton said days before the Crown Heights Riots that led to Yankel Rosenbaum’s 1991 death, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” At the funeral of the black child hit by a car in a Jewish funeral procession that set off the riots, Sharpton further inflamed matters by referring to Jews as “diamond dealers” (a remark more temperate than the “Hitler Did Not Do the Job” banner displayed at the memorial service).

Any invocation of double standards regarding the Capitol Hill riot elicits calls of whataboutism, kind of a tu quoque for people who flunked Latin, from the New York Times and other redoubts of fuhgeddaboudism. This latter phenomenon seems the more relevant to the current situation. Fuhgeddaboudism, a kind of Jedi Mind Trick for people who did not watch Star Wars, demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/enough-with-the-outrage.php

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded. Here is a video reminder:

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June:

They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.