RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/16/trumps

When President Trump tweeted Sunday that “‘Progressive’ Democrat congresswomen” should “go back” to the countries they came from, the vapors swept through the political class and media. Granted, the tweet was crude. But the delivery should not invalidate the point.

Both parties condemned the tweet. And journalists, who can never find anything a Democrat says to even be mildly objectionable, or untrue, predictably responded as if Trump had hung a portrait of Hitler in the Oval Office, which is how they react nearly every time he opens his mouth or fires off a tweet. The backlash was more overheated than the tweet.

For the record, here’s the tweet in its entirety:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274320/american-hating-americans-are-ultimate-ingrates-bruce-thornton

“As for Trump, once again he has said what many Americans think, but seldom hear from the Republican elite. And he has stood up for those same Americans who love their country, not because it’s perfect, not because they think its history is sinless, but because it has in word and deed shown itself to be the “last best hope” we fallen mortals have in a tragic world. And most of all, we love America because it is who we are, its ideals the unum that allows the pluribus to become a people yet keep its diversity. There’s not much more we can expect from imperfect human beings.”

With his usual flair for hyperbole and indifference to factual details, Donald Trump last week tweet-blasted the so-called “Squad” of female freshman Congressmen “of color” for slandering America as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and numerous other empty epithets. Though Trump was careless for suggesting, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”––since only one, Ilhan Omar, was born abroad––his sentiment is still valid, and has been shared for decades by millions of Americans angry over their homeland being demonized by immigrants and fellow citizens alike.

This sentiment was memorably captured by country singer Merle Haggard in his hit “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Released in December 1969, the song expressed the anger of the “Silent Majority” that had just put Richard Nixon in the White House. And the lyrics identified who Americans were angry at: the free, comfortable New Leftists, college students, bougie hippies, and liberal elite fellow-travelers who burned the American Flag, slandered our soldiers as baby-killers, and called their country “AmeriKKKa.” Haggard especially targeted the antiwar activists who insulted our troops even as they were fighting and dying, and who “love our milk and honey” but “preach about some other way of livin’.” Sound familiar?

But it was one line in the chorus that summed up many Americans’ attitude: “If you don’t love it leave it.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/american-flag-men-died-for-it/

They risked everything for it, not for some idea or abstraction but for the piece of fabric itself.

The American flag’s place in our culture is beginning to look less unassailable.

The symbol itself is under attack, as we’ve seen with Nike dumping a shoe design featuring an early American flag, Megan Rapinoe defending her national-anthem protests (she says she will never sing the song again), and protesters storming an ICE facility in Aurora, Colo., and replacing the U.S. flag with a Mexican flag.

U.S. soccer had a pretty good statement a while back setting out, in response to Rapinoe, why it has an expectation that players will stand during the national anthem (which, of course, is all about the flag):

Representing your country is a privilege and honor for any player or coach that is associated with U.S. Soccer’s National Team. Therefore, our national anthem has particular significance for U.S. Soccer. In front of national and often global audiences, the playing of our national anthem is an opportunity for our Men’s and Women’s National Team players and coaches to reflect upon the liberties and freedom we all appreciate in this country.

(Rapinoe called the sentiment “cowardly.”)

The U.S. soccer statement could have added that men have fought for the flag, and not just in the sense of fighting under it as members of the U.S. armed services. Our troops have literally fought for the flag, for its physical advance and preservation. This is the story of color sergeants during the Civil War.

Color sergeants carried the flag —typically, both the U.S. flag and the regimental flag — into battle, and not a weapon. They depended for protection on the color guard, a small contingent of troops dedicated to the task. The flag, held aloft and leading the way, was important as a matter of tactics (to mark the location of the unit in the confusion of battle), of morale (to provide a rallying point for the troops), and of devotion and honor (to lose the flag to the enemy was a deep disgrace).

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/14/when-cultural-marxists-advance-their-agenda-everyo/

“It’s a new age, all right. One in which darkness poses as light, and light is suppressed by darkness, all in the name of tolerance.”

Tyranny can arrive fast in the form of tanks and jackboots. Or it can come gradually, snuffing out liberty and replacing it with fear.

The latter is what we’re facing today, as cultural Marxists advance their doctrines and silence any dissension.

Each day brings new examples, but here are a few that show why a sleeping church and any friend of liberty had better wake up before it’s too late.

Social media giants Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Google’s YouTube and even Pinterest have all been caught censoring Christians and conservatives. Most of it is being done at the behest of LGBTQ activists.

If that particular issue is of no concern, consider the famous quote by once-Nazi supporter and then-foe Martin Niemoller. Various versions of the pastor’s statement have circulated, but here is the gist: “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.

This past week, we learned that Amazon.com has banned books by psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., at the request of an LGBTQ activist who did not like Mr. Nicolosi’s theory of the origins of male homosexuality and his advocacy of reparative therapy to reduce such inclinations.

It’s part of a pattern. Last December, Amazon removed an app from Living Hope Ministries, which helps people who want to leave homosexuality. Amazon, however, has no problem carrying materials promoting every sort of sexual behavior no matter how unhealthy, even such odious practices as pedophilia (“Male Intergenerational Intimacy.”)

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/14/of-progressive-carnivores-and-cannibals/

The Obama-era Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes embraced just 11 years ago by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.

The parameters of marriage, in Obama’s words “between a man and woman,” has now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to transgendered fixations.

Obama once protested that he was no king who could open the border and grant amnesties by fiat. Yet his view of immigration has metamorphosed well beyond DACA and Dreamers into Democratic candidates going into Mexico to escort aliens unlawfully into our country, and 500 sanctuary jurisdictions in which federal immigration law is all but null and void. An American citizen convicted of using a fake Social Security Number and phony ID is a felon who is all but unemployable; an illegal alien who commits the same crimes learns quickly that these are not deportable offenses and mostly never prosecuted.

In a nanosecond, Betsy Ross’s iconic colonial flag, which once emblazoned the backdrop of the 2012 Obama inauguration ceremony, have become racist icons—or so Nike pitchman Colin Kaepernick has decreed, ordering his corporate bosses to remove them from commemorative sneakers.

Obamacare has abruptly morphed into “Medicare for All”—including illegal aliens who are to be eligible the moment they cross the border, despite never having paid a dime into the system.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/14/dont-celebrate-bastille-day/

Since I am writing on Bastille Day, I am prompted to wonder why the French—or anyone else, for that matter—celebrate this infamous date. After all, the “storming” of that royal keep in 1789 was the spark that started the conflagration of the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, in which the rule of law and the institutions of civil society survived the change of governments, the French Revolution was one of the signal bad events in world history. It consumed civil society and the centuries-old institutions of civilization. It was an unalloyed triumph of the totalitarian spirit, and in this respect it presaged and inspired that even greater assault on decency and freedom, the Bolshevik Revolution, the opening act of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The butcher’s bill for the French Revolution is many hundreds of thousands. Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of tens upon tens of millions and the universal immiseration of the people whose lives it controlled.

Yet today’s news is full of cheery stories about Bastille Day celebrations. Why?

It is generally a bootless errand, I know, to oppose myth with history. Myth, feeding a deep need, subsumes history. Still, truth demands that the effort be made.

One canard that we were all brought up on is that the Bastille was a loathsome dungeon full of innocent political prisoners. In fact, it harbored not hordes but precisely seven inmates when the mob stormed it. Contrary to what you have been told, the prisoners were detained in good conditions. At least one was attended by his own chef.  Bernard-René de Launay, the governor, was by all accounts a fair and patient man. But that did not save him from the mob’s “revolutionary justice.” They dragged him out of the fortress and stabbed him to death.

By rights, Bastille Day should be a day of national mourning or contrition. That it is not tells us a great deal—about the persistence of human credulousness, for example, and the folly of subordinating the imperfect, long-serving structures of civilization to the demands of impatient people infatuated by their own unquenchable sense of virtue. Tocqueville, in his book on the ancien régime at the eve of the revolution said that the “the contrast between benign theories and violent acts” was one of the Revolution’s “strangest characteristics.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/any_organization_that_denies_antisemitism_loses_credibility.html

American students, many of whom display a shocking degree of ignorance about the Holocaust, will not find much trustworthy and objective information about anti-Semitism from touted academic databases such as the CQ Researcher.  The alleged “in-depth” report on anti-Semitism dated May 12, 2017 is filled with statements about President Trump, white supremacy, and right-wing hostility.  Thus, the report asserts:

In the run-up to the presidential election and afterward, the United States has experienced disturbing outbreaks of anti-Semitism, including a spate of incidents on more than 100 college campuses, where white supremacists have been distributing anti-Semitic fliers and openly recruiting adherents.  Some human rights and Jewish activists say President Trump has emboldened right-wing hostility toward Jews, but others say such charges are unjustified.  Defining anti-Semitism is controversial.  Members of Congress and state legislators want to codify a definition that would include opposition to Israel’s existence.  But pro-Palestinian and civil liberties groups say that would violate free-speech rights.  A similar debate is playing out in Europe, where some countries have seen a rise in deadly attacks on Jews in recent years, often by radicalized Muslims, such as the 2015 terrorist attack on a kosher grocery in Paris.  Paradoxically, growing anti-Muslim attitudes in countries experiencing an influx of refugees have also spurred more prejudice against Jews — the target of history’s longest hatred.

At no time does the article speak of the ugliness of such campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) who deliberately incite anti-Semitic acts on universities.  This might assist a student in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism.

https://quillette.com/2019/07/11/neutralizing

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell observed that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He detailed how certain manners of diction are employed to that end—dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious and otherwise meaningless words all work to constitute a kind of inflated, euphemistic style of expression. This divests language of plain meaning in order to obscure brutal realities and to hide the “gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims.” As these habits are adopted and spread, clear thinking and good communication become more difficult and the process self-perpetuates. Stupid, ugly, and oppressive ideas actively distort language to create a semblance of reason and respectability; in turn, the corruption of language further predisposes people to uncritically accept and conform to the same sorts of orthodoxies.

In a vein similar to Orwell’s lexicology of apologetics, criminological theory may help inform an understanding of how speech is used in defense of the indefensible at another level of analysis—that of rhetorical strategies. Specifically, what follows is a look at the online discourse surrounding the recent assault of a journalist by antifascist demonstrators, as viewed through the lens of Neutralization Theory.

Neutralization

The crux of Neutralization Theory is this: acts that would violate accepted laws or norms, or otherwise contradict one’s beliefs or self-image, carry the threat of guilt and shame. That threat can be neutralized, allowing for such violations to occur, using rationalizations that deny the disparity between one’s values and actions. In a sense, these rationalizations are coping strategies for managing moral dissonance, quieting one’s conscience in the pursuit or defense of expedience.

Neutralization Theory was originally conceived as an explanation of juvenile delinquency by Gresham Sykes and David Matza. It has since been broadly expanded and applied to adult and white-collar crime, and to other acts of deviance and subcultural divergence. It has been used to examine honor crimes as well as the coping strategies of domestic violence victims, the denial of elderly abuse by both victims and abusers, the perpetration of right-wing violence and online ideological extremism, and even genocide and intergenerational war guilt.

Neutralization Theory “transcends the realm of criminology…[with] ‘universal applicability,’ as it can be applied to any situation where there are inconsistencies between one’s actions and beliefs,” whether individually or collectively. And so, while it has not yet been formally applied to the kind of context examined here (i.e., apologetic framings of leftist political street violence), the sheer breadth of the literature seems to suggest a cursory exploration in that direction may be warranted and fruitful.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22931/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-2020-democrat-party

  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com: http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The Democrat party platform for 2020 is a staggering political humanitarian hoax that disguises anti-Americanism as altruism. The Democratic National Committee presents itself as “working hard to advance issues like immigration reform, education reform, health care reform, and alternative energy.” Sounds great – all humanitarian hoaxes do. So, let’s see how this works.

Countries are defined by four basic elements and the Democrat party has taken aim at all four. We will examine these elements one at a time.

– territory

– population

– culture

– government

1. Territory

Territory refers to the demarcation of a country’s physical borders that define its earthly space and separate it from other countries, each with its own government. Without borders there is no country.

The open borders platform embraced by the Democrat party is their signature anti-American immigration reform. Open borders deliberately threaten the sovereign territorial borders of the United States by rejecting any attempts to defend the borders against the current mass invasion of illegal immigrants. While disingenuously insisting that open borders are a humanitarian issue, Democrat candidates oppose border wall funding and propose abolishing ICE so that nothing and no one can stop the flow of this massive invasion.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-ilhan-omar-overcome-her-prejudice-11562970265

Oh puleez! I appreciate Hirsi Ali’s unique biography and valor, but Ilhan Omar is programmed and won election because she represents the faith driven hatred of her constituents. Why should she alter her hatreds? Her fellow Democrats give her a pass, fearing that they would be tarred as Islamophobes….rsk

I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.

Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.

Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.

In my experience it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to unlearn hate without coming to terms with how you learned to hate. Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.