RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272923/bad-ideas-make-bad-progressive-policies-bruce-thornton

Behind the stark melodrama of our political conflicts lies the progressive consensus: The collective use of power to pursue various policy aims depends on technical knowledge and science. But this view itself depends on certain contestable modern ideas about human nature and behavior that are matters not of science, but of ideas found in philosophical speculation. Policy–the aims collectively we should pursue and how–reflects ideas, not technical knowledge. And all ideas, good or bad, assume some vision of what humans are and what they should do as members of a political community.

Barack Obama, for example, entered office vowing to “restore science to its rightful place,” implying that his predecessor just “made stuff up,” a phrase he used recently in South Africa in a subtle dig at Donald Trump. Our partisan disputes over policy reflect this unearned assumption of certainty on the part of the left, and explains their passionate hatred of those who oppose them. To progressives, such people are irredeemable flat-earthers resisting the progress of knowledge in order to serve evil ends like defending their racist and sexist “privilege.”Yet on the level of ideas that reflect notions of human nature, the self-styled “brights” on the left are often the slaves of some defunct intellectual or outdated received wisdom, not the sober, rational followers of scientific facts. And those bad ideas lead to bad policies.

Take the perennial progressive “crisis” of income inequality. Much of what progressives mean by “social justice” comprises eliminating gaps between wealthier Americans and everybody else. Any disparities represent the injustices of capitalism and the tax system designed to benefit the rich.

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/jussie-smollett-hate-hoaxes-mainstream-media/

People give in to the temptation to manufacture reasons to be pitied, and the buyers can’t resist the pitch because it comes with the opportunity to hate included.

Here’s something you might not know: In Nazi Germany, very few Jews staged bogus hate crimes against themselves.Here’s some more trivia: Very few blacks in the Jim Crow South went to great lengths to pretend that they were harassed or attacked by racists.You know why? Because that would be incredibly stupid. What, exactly, would the German Jew who staged an assault on himself gain from it? Where would he or she go to ask for sympathy or recompense? Conjure any horror story you like, the Nazi official you brought it to would say, “Yeah, and . . . ?” The black sharecropper who took the time to make his own cross and burn it on his own property would benefit . . . how?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/changing

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”

Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles.

Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle?

Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather could be perceived as symptomatic of too much climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Suddenly, blizzards, deluges and subzero temperatures meant that typically unpredictable weather was “haywire” because of affluent Westernized lifestyles.

Affirmative action originated as a means of making up for past prejudices against the African-American community, which comprised about 12 percent of the population.

By the late 1960s, slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation were finally considered unique stains on the American past, to be redeemed in the present by set-aside programs in college admissions and hiring predicated on racial considerations.

The problem with affirmative action is that the very name implied redress for historical wrongs that could be “affirmed” by compensatory action for a particular minority of the population. But lots of other groups wished to be included in an ever-expanding catalog of the oppressed.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/a-fine-and

To make sense of the recent spate of hysteria on the Left, it helps to understand how their minds work—or, as they like say, connect the dots. The shortest route between an isolated instance (Jussie Smollett, John Wayne) and a knee-jerk cry of racism, sexism or some other pet -ism is from one neuron to the one directly adjacent to it in a progressive’s brain. Every event, even ones faked or misleadingly reported, must have both a political cause and a coercive resolution: the Narrative demands it. Amplified by social media, it’s driving us all mad.

Any random weather event can trigger cries of the apocalypse from the likes of Al Gore or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A putative but wholly implausible attack during the sub-zero arctic chill of a Chicago late night instantly is seized upon as proof of America’s incorrigible (and thus de-legitimizing) racial prejudice. A wrongly interpreted word, or gesture, or smile, even the use of a personal pronoun, is cause for alarm, insults, or legal action. J’accuse! has become the national motto as the Twitter tumbrels roll. Heads dutifully roll into the baskets as the Madame Defarges of the media click their knitting needles and fashion the next installment of the Narrative tapestry.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/19/the-cost-

A defining feature of the 20th century was the struggle between capitalism and three major types of socialism: Communism, national socialism, and fascism. All three types of socialisms, as well as Cuba and Venezuela today, failed to duplicate the accomplishments of capitalism in raising the standard of living. Yet, a supposed new brand of socialism, “democratic socialism,” is emerging in the United States. Democratic socialism has two objectives consistent with all other types of socialism: the top-down control of resource allocation and the top-down predetermined economic outcome. But democratic socialism also has one institution that is said to set it apart from its predecessors: democratic socialism supports democratic elections.

Unfortunately, the undeniable economic success of capitalism made it unlikely that voters would support democratic socialism at the ballot box on the basis of efficiency. Democratic socialists, the so-called progressives, instead found their rallying cry in income inequalities. They promise the equalization of incomes via a variety of redistributional policies such as extraordinary marginal tax rates on high incomes, government sponsored jobs, weakening of private property rights via regulations, and measures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s return-to-the-cave proposal, called the “Green New Deal.” (As a footnote: In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx and Engels criticized German socialists for advocating income equality).

Redistributional policies call for more administrative programs. Those programs require more bureaucrats and bigger budgets. More bureaucrats and bigger budgets increase the role of government in the economy. More government in the economy increases the transfer of resources from competitive economic markets to political markets. And this transfer of resources to political markets incentivizes people to vote for a living. Clearly, democratic socialists want to throw out the equality of opportunity in favor of the equality of outcome. Electing the progressives must have consequences.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/strange-paradoxes-race-environmentalism-immigration-gulf-between-rhetoric-and-reality/

From race, to environmentalism, to wealth, the gulf between ideological rhetoric and reality has rarely been wider.

Modern prophets often say one thing and do another. Worse, they often advocate in the abstract as a way of justifying their doing the opposite in the concrete.

The result is that contemporary culture abounds with the inexplicable — mostly because modern progressivism makes all sorts of race, class, and gender exceptions for politically incorrect felonies, an appeasement that ensures an absence of deterrence and thus even more transgressions.

Paradox No. 1: Merchants of Hate. We are told that white, racist young men are preying on people of color, obsessed with skin color (and gender), and emancipated by Donald Trump’s Klan-like MAGA army. In truth, the purveyors of such theories are themselves merchants of hate, who stereotype and demonize on the basis of skin color. And they do so, largely for anticipated career advantages, on the principle that supposed victims of white bigots can translate such ill treatment into publicity and, with it, attention and career enhancement. How did this epidemic of hate happen in 2019 America?

Answer: a) There are not enough racists left to fuel the current insatiable appetite of the anti-racism industry. So both victimizers and victims have to be invented — as we see with the Duke lacrosse lynching, the Virginia fraternity hoax, the Covington-kids invention, and the recent Jussie Smollett fraud. b) There are few punishments for fraud, but lots of rewards for being victimized, and so deterrence is lost and the merchants of hate assume they are free to invent what they please. c) Anything useful to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump is seen as a moral act, whether equating the Covington MAGA-hatted teenagers as veritable Klansmen or fitting out Smollett’s hired thugs with lynch rope and red hats.

Paradox No. 2: Green Filth. Ecology and environmentalism are supposedly efforts to prevent the natural world around from being spoiled by man and his modern-day lifestyle. Nowhere is green power stronger than in urban California. And yet nowhere are major cities (such as San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) dirtier, more dangerous, and more festering as a result of human indifference — or public policy.

Let me first explain what a dhimmi is. It is an Arabic noun referring to a non-Muslim who becomes subject to Islamic servitude. Dhimmitude is the condition that dhimmis endure under such Islamic power and influence.

Back in 2006 I first wrote an article titled, Dhimmitude for Dummies, which was published in a conservative website. In it I attempted to warn about the terrible danger posed from stealth Islamic jihad infiltrating the Western world, threatening Judeo-Christian civilization and, in particular, menacing our very own United States of America.

Several years earlier, on that terrible day we know as 9/11, Islamic fanatics in the name of Allah destroyed the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon using hi-jacked passenger planes as aerial bombs. They failed in their attempt to destroy the White House using yet another hi-jacked plane. All three aircraft were filled with doomed men, women and children.

This atrocity was a violent and vengeful act that was celebrated by millions of Muslims around the world. Who can forget the TV pictures of Palestinian Arabs handing out candies as they rejoiced while watching the iconic twin towers falling and thousands dying in agony.

The atrocious Islamic ‘success’ on 9/11 became a rallying war cry for untold millions of Muslims who saw in their fevered minds – and still do – an Islamic victory over a vanquished United States of America. For them it was a 21st century revenge by resurgent Islam over the so-called ‘infidels’ whose ancestors centuries earlier had beaten back the many previous Islamic invasions by Muslim hordes.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/debunking-qanta-ahmeds-corrosive-claim-antisemitism-is-profoundly-against-islam/

“Until Qanta Ahmed musters the intellectual and moral courage to similarly connect the modern scourge of Islamic Jew-hatred to Islam itself, she and her obfuscating misrepresentations will continue to do more harm than good.”

Qanta Ahmed is a secular Pakistani Muslim physician, and occasional talking head, who fancies herself “a Muslim expert in Islamism.” As I have demonstrated previously, she in fact has a very thin veneer of understanding of Islam, and an apparent willingness to engage in takiya, sanctioned Islamic dissimulation.

Appearing Saturday evening with Judge Jeanine Pirro, Ahmed elaborated on an op-ed she had published in The Daily Caller on February 14 that claimed:

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an American Muslim of Somali origin, shames American Muslims with the antisemitism she has brought to Congress.

Notwithstanding this rather dubious assertion of “shame,” given the global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred, which now includes Muslim diaspora populations in the West, Ahmed had the following exchange (from 35:14-35-37) with Judge Pirro. Ahmed observed, appropriately, “Empowering antisemitism is against every American value,” which elicited a quick interjection from Judge Pirro, “And against our Judeo-Christian ethics,” prompting Ahmed to aver, “And it is also against Islam, which reveres the Torah and Judaism.” This latter, patently false statement by Ahmed, in turn, prompted Judge Pirro to add the requisite cultural relativist fig leaf caveat, “And you and I understand when you say, ‘Islamist’ there is a political ideology, versus the Muslim religion,” because Ahmed had earlier (32:07-17) accused Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of “ringing completely true with Islamist antisemitism”—as if this artificial construct was completely divorced from Islam’s intrinsic Jew-hatred. Nodding approvingly, Ahmed quickly chimed in, “Exactly,” and the segment ended.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/what-to-do-about-rebirth-of-socialism/Where it came from and how to stop it.

‘The most important political event of the twentieth century,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1976, “is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.” Plenty of self-described Marxist and socialist regimes existed throughout the world, Kristol recognized. It was rather the ideas behind such regimes that had reached a moral and intellectual endpoint. Nor was this passing away entirely to be cheered. “For with the passing of the socialist ideal,” Kristol went on, “there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the Western civilization which emerged from that tradition.”

The inheritors of the socialist ideal were totalitarian states on one hand and stagnant social democracies on the other. By the end of the twentieth century, these too had passed. China (and later Vietnam) decided that to get rich is glorious, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states collapsed into squabbling nationalities and kleptocracies, the socialist autocracies that had depended on Moscow for support receded into irrelevance. What Kristol called “a dwindling band of socialist fideists” remained behind, the last remnant of a dwindling faith. “People who persist in calling themselves socialist, while decrying the three quarters of the world that has proclaimed itself socialist, and who can find a socialist country nowhere but in their imaginings — such people are anachronisms.”

Not anymore. If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one. Just as nationalism has reasserted itself on the political right, socialism has grown in force on the left. In the 21st century, the two ideologies are estranged and antagonistic twins, paired in Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The Democratic victory in 2018 has elevated socialism to a height it has not reached in the United States in more than a century. Only in recent weeks, however, have defenders of democratic capitalism become aware of how great the socialist challenge really is. Only now are we beginning to formulate a response.

…….Here The New York Times has spent the last three years running interference for the Democratic party, skirling hysterically against candidate Trump, then President Trump, and minimizing every evidence of wrongdoing by the Hillary-Fusion GPS-rogue intelligence and law enforcement contingent while simultaneously coming done like a ton of bricks against anyone associated with the President, from Michael Flynn on down.

And now we have Andrew McCabe, former Acting Director of the FBI, beginning his book tour with an interview on 60 Minutes in which he admits that he was at the center of a plot to unseat the President of the United States. The Times put it this way: ‘McCabe Says Justice Dept. Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’

There follows a few hundred words of brow-wrinkled prose about their ‘so alarmed,’ ‘dire concerns’ that the President had just fired their guy, FBI director James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey, that they got together and wondered how they could entice the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to collude (ooo, there’s that word!) to invoke the 25th Amendment and jettison a guy they didn’t approve of.

The Times story is cast in their best anodyne prose, carefully tilted to make it seem as if this was perfectly reasonable, business-as-usual stuff.

But it wasn’t reasonable, and it is business-as-usual only in a banana republic or a polity that is essentially ruled by hyper-bureaucratized administrative apparatus.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Even for the Times that must have been a twisted cue.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Think about it. On May 9. the President fires his employee, James Comey. Panic in Bureau. Scarcely a week later, the Big Boy Scout, Robert Mueller is appointed by Rod Rosenstein to be Special Counsel in charge of the Get Trump battalion. It’s a real flood the zone operation. Pre-dawn raids, full-press intimidation, careers ruined.