RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16266/law-and-justice

For me, the real enemies of America are the extremists on both sides: the hard left that would bring America down, the hard right white supremacists and neo‑Nazis…. People from the hard left do not even want to hear from people on the center left.

I think the last thing The New York Times wants is for people to come to their own conclusion, because The New York Times bars dissenting points of view and fired editors who authorize them to be published on its pages…. The Times has taken the “op” out of “op-ed.”

The combination of elected prosecutors and elected judges has made our legal system far too political. Too many decisions are made by people, crowds, and pressure groups. When you combine four aspects of our system — prosecutors are elected, judges are elected, juries are ordinary, lay people, and the judges who control the juries are often subject to re‑election — the risks of our justice system being turned over to the masses, to the mobs, to the crowds, to the chanters, becomes all too real, and our system of checks and balances becomes weaker.

Remember that when America was founded at the end of the 18th century, the greatest fear was of the mob. We were watching what was happening a little later on in France with the revolution, and with the killing of so many innocent people in the name of the revolution.

In China, some years ago, I was invited to go to a trial, a man who was accused of stealing some items. After the evidence came in — you had evidence from the prosecution, the defendant testified — and then the judge ordered the doors opened. Hundreds of people poured in from the streets. The judge said, “Now we’ll hear from the masses.” The masses started yelling, “Convict! Convict! Convict!” Of course, the judge convicted, because the masses were the ones in a communist country who had control over the justice system. I never want to see that happen in the United States of America

It is very hard to be a dissenter today. If you are a dissenter today, you risk being canceled. If you are an editor who is willing to publish dissenting material, you risk being fired. If you are a dissenter today in a crowd, you risk being beaten up.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/19/will-2021-be-1984/

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.” 

Strong-man Baathists, Iranian Khomeinists, and the German National Socialists claimed they hated capitalism. So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power. These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the hundreds of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

Vice President as President

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.

It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline—and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-revolution-is-winning

Radicals from the 1960s and 1970s now hold powerful positions in government and academia

This is what the revolution looks like.

Weather Underground terrorists, who made no secret of being anti-AmeriKKKan “small-c” communists, are having more success than they could have dreamed of in the 1960s.

They are dominating the language. You know that whole “white privilege” nostrum that we’re paying universities $60K per year to drum into our children’s brains? It is derived from their lamentation of “white skin privilege.” In their ideology, the revolution to overthrow the capitalist, racist, imperialist system summoned them — lily white radicals — to abandon their privilege and embrace the armed struggle.

Among their most influential thinkers was Bill Ayers. He got a windfall from the government’s failure to prosecute him for the bombings he carried out and the mass murders he planned but was insufficiently competent to execute. It was a second career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois. As Sol Stern relates in a 2006 City Journal essay that should be required reading today, this entailed designing curricula used by today’s hard-Left academics, based on what Ayers saw as a moral imperative to convert schools into social-justice indoctrination labs.

It worked.

Of course, in the days before they brought the revolution into the classroom, they pursued it on urban streets, prioritizing war on cops. To the avant-garde, the police are the pointy end of the oppressive government spear, enforcing its laws and imposing the racist society’s caste system. For the revolution to succeed, the police have to be discredited, defunded, and defanged. For the Weather Underground, that meant branching into such radical offshoots as the May 19 Communist Organization and conspiring with black separatists.

https://www.city-journal.org/conversation-on-race-and-equality

On June 24, amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about the current moment. An edited version of their conversation follows.

Glenn Yu: I’ve asked to speak to you because I find myself in the awkward position of being at once uncomfortable with the liberal stance on race that seems to deny the underlying reality of the black experience today while also being uncomfortable with conservatives who seem to disdain the George Floyd-related protests in a manner that makes it hard for me to believe that they have any empathy for the problems. I am also confused about whether it’s even my place to talk about these issues.

Glenn Loury: Well, I can’t exactly answer that question, but I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch. Sure, we could project a motive onto him, onto the expression on his face, onto his smirk; we could feed thoughts into his head that make him symbolically emblematic of a certain trauma or sickness in American society, and this all may or may not be true. It might be true. But it might not be.

You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.