RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-periodic-reminder-that-evil-is-real-rage-history-israel-hamas-6b255ebd?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Potter Stewart observed in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) that while hard-core pornography is difficult to define, “I know it when I see it.” The same is true of evil.

A decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it is looking at. The torments that Hamas “militants” inflicted on Oct. 7—mass slaughter, rape, the beheading and incineration of babies—amounted to behavior that the high court of any uncorrupted intelligence in the world would describe as evil.

What other word would be sufficient? Wicked? Gruesome? Atrocious? Naughty? No one with any brains uses the word evil lightly. I tend to capitalize it to give the concept (vile, mysterious, theologically absolute) its metaphysical due. President Biden chose his language carefully when he spoke of the Hamas raids as “pure, unadulterated evil.” Since Oct. 7, the word—from which people used to shy away, regarding it as radioactive, over-the-top—has become commonplace and almost unavoidable.

Some years ago I wrote “Evil: An Investigation.” Preparing the book, I would sometimes ask people if they knew anyone they considered to be truly evil. Most would think for a moment, then shake their heads: “Not really. Hitler, of course. But I didn’t know him.” When I asked William F. Buckley Jr., he replied without hesitation, “Gore Vidal.” I laughed. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.

Many people believe evil doesn’t exist. That view is especially common among the rational and enlightened, who insist that events always have a scientific, clinical or political explanation. They are mistaken. Evil is real, with a spooky, inscrutable life of its own.

Evil resides, a law unto itself, in the penetralia of history and human nature. Anyone who doubts its existence should study, in no particular order: the Cambodians’ mass killings under Pol Pot (1975-79), the Japanese Rape of Nanking (1937-38), the Belgians’ atrocities in the Congo (1885-1908) and of course the Holocaust. You might begin your studies in that last topic by reading “Into That Darkness” by Gitta Sereny. It’s about how Franz Stangl, an ordinary Austrian policeman and family man, morphed into the monster who presided over the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

https://www.thefp.com/p/qatars-war-for-young-american-minds?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Right now, senior leaders of Hamas, the perpetrators of the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, are huddled in Qatar. They’ve been there for years. But American foreign policy has turned a blind eye. Why? One reason might be that for the last 25 years, this small, energy-rich state has pumped billions into America to purchase influence and good favor. 

The Qataris have spent their lavish fortune at American law firms, on lobbying contracts with former senior officials, and on junkets and partnerships with big media companies. The biggest recipients of Qatari largesse, though, have been major universities and think tanks. 

The numbers are staggering. According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities: 

Since 1997, Qatar has donated more than $103 million to Virginia Commonwealth University for a fine arts campus. 

Since 2001, Qatar has donated $1.8 billion to Cornell for a medical school. 

Since 2003, Qatar has donated nearly $700 million to Texas A&M for an engineering campus. 

Since 2004, Qatar has donated $740 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a computer science campus. 

Since 2005, Qatar has donated $760 million to Georgetown University for a school of politics. 

Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University for a school of journalism. 

One might expect that scholarly institutions that have benefited from this autocracy’s money would rethink their partnership after Qatar’s foreign minister said that “Israel alone is responsible” for the pogrom perpetrated by Hamas terrorists. Or after Qatar’s prime minister on Friday declined to close the office Hamas maintains in its capital. But these universities have given no indication that they will end their profitable partnership with Qatar. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died-konstantin-kisin?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one. 

The Reality of Woke Ideology

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/23/gag-order-against-trump-is-the-real-threat-to-democracy/

The reason you have not heard of a gag order on par with the one imposed on former President Trump is that it is highly unusual. Normally, in a criminal proceeding, there are no gag orders. To the extent they exist, they typically only bind the lawyers, who are admonished to adhere to the rules of professional conduct. Rarely—as in almost never—are criminal defendants forced into a gag order on such spurious grounds as they might “vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants who are simply doing their jobs.”

In fact, precedent almost uniformly emphasizes familiar First Amendment principles, which limit the court’s authority, including disfavor towards “prior restraints” and “content-based restrictions” on speech.

In a case involving the prosecution of a congressman, the Sixth Circuit federal court of appeals noted that “such broadly based restrictions on speech in connection with litigation are seldom, if ever, justified. Trial judges, the government, the lawyers and the public must tolerate robust and at times acrimonious or even silly public debate about litigation.”

The Sixth Circuit emphasized that criminal defendants are already very much disadvantaged vis a vis the government, and that any court restrictions must accommodate this asymmetry. “A criminal defendant awaiting trial in a controversial case has the full power of the government arrayed against him and the full spotlight of media attention focused upon him. The defendant’s interest in replying to the charges and to the associated adverse publicity, thus, is at a peak. So is the public’s interest in the proper functioning of the judicial machinery.”

Other circuits follow a less restrictive rule, but even those emphasize the need for any such orders to be narrowly tailored to accomplish a substantial government interest.

Courts typically have broad powers to enforce discipline in their courtrooms and over lawyers, but preemptively stifling a defendant from “making statements targeting prosecutors, possible witnesses and court staff” has a very broad reach. After all, isn’t every member of Congress, every January 6 defendant, and every single person Trump spoke to about the 2020 election a potential witness?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/24/how-did-biden-manage-to-lose-300-billion-in-tax-revenues/

Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department reported that, despite a growing economy and low unemployment, the federal deficit shot up by $320 billion in fiscal year 2023. That’s unusual. But what’s really bizarre is why the deficit exploded.

According to the report, overall spending actually dropped by 2% compared with 2022 as the COVID-19 spending splurge abated.

What drove up the deficit this year was a sudden and completely unexpected 9% drop in tax revenues. Not only did revenues come up hundreds of billions lower than last year, but they were well below what everybody expected them to be.

At the start of the year, the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget projected revenues for fiscal 2023 at around $4.7 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office figured it would be $4.8 trillion.

The actual amount: $4.4 trillion.

In other words, there’s between $300 billion and $400 billion worth of missing tax revenues.

Keep in mind that those forecasts assumed that nothing changed in terms of policy over the course of the year, and all were based on economic projections that turned out, if anything, to be pessimistic.

The CBO, for example, figured the nation’s GDP would be $26.3 trillion by the middle of this year. The actual number was $27.1 trillion. It projected an unemployment rate of 4.6%. The actual number was 3.6%. It expected there to be 154 million jobs; there were 155.5 million. The CBO figured inflation would be running at 4.1%. It was 3.7%.

In a normal world, a better-than-expected economy would result in more revenues for the federal government, not less.

Keep in mind, too, that it’s exceedingly rare for tax revenues to drop from one year to the next. In fact, it’s happened only eight times since 1960 – always around an economic downturn – and the average decline was just 4.7%. Even when the COVID lockdowns caused a massive recession, revenues only dipped by 1.2% in 2020. (Revenues plunged nearly 17% during the financial crisis.)

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/22/the-george-floyd-jr-narrative-unraveled/

I wonder what Derek Chauvin is thinking these days?

He’s the former Minneapolis cop who became the Scapegoat Number One after George Floyd—sorry, St. George Floyd—died from a Fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest in May 2020.

As all the world knows, that is not how The Narrative tells it. Witness Wikipedia, that Great Repository of Approved Narratives. “George Perry Floyd Jr.,” it begins, “was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020.”

“Murdered,” eh?  “May” have passed a counterfeit bill, you say?

Well, that’s what we were told.

It takes a long time for someone to be canonized in the Catholic Church. There is an official process to be followed. Some miracles have to be recorded. One moves from being denominated a Servus Dei, a “servant of God,” to the status of being Venerabilis, to Beatus, and finally Sanctus. It’s much easier and much quicker with our secular saints. All you need is a festering politically correct grievance, a compliant media, and a terrified justice system.

So it was with the woman-and-drug abusing felon George Perry Floyd Jr. His corpse was not cold before he was elevated to secular sainthood  and became the mascot for the Black Lives Matter hooligans who, over the course of a year or more, inflicted more than $2 billion of property damage, injured or maimed scores of people, and released a mesmerizing, racially fortified toxin into the atmosphere that addled the minds and hearts of all the beautiful people who run the country and from which we have yet to recover fully. Last week, on the occasion of Floyd’s birthday, Joe Biden prayed at the shrine, issuing an emetic White House statement “to honor his life and legacy” and urge us “to redeem the soul of America.”

Back in 2021, Derek Chauvin, along with three of his police colleagues, were offered up as sacrificial lambs by Minneapolis prosecutors. ChaUvin was slapped with federal and well as state convictions and, as I write, is rotting in an Arizona prison for the murder of Floyd.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/war-destroys-leftist-orthodoxies-6947fb06?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Wars are times of transition, when old ideologies are discredited: slavery, isolationism, appeasement, socialism. Now, like the 1,200 health professionals who claimed during 2020’s protests and riots that racism was a bigger health concern than Covid, another set of progressives touting tired orthodoxies are being discredited before our eyes.

After Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians, a director of diversity and inclusion at Cornell’s business school glorified terrorism, writing about “the resistance being launched by Palestinians.” Remind me why we have DEI departments? At Harvard more than 30 students groups signed a letter claiming Israel was “the only one to blame.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is worried about “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Twitter is littered with tweets saying “this is decolonization in action.” All these support an oppression narrative.

Where did these people get such ideas? The universities. Here’s an introductory-level EMR (Ethnicity, Migration, Rights) class at Harvard: “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” The course discusses how “to rebel against global white supremacy.” I found similar courses at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke and other top schools. Another Harvard colonialism course studies “decoloniality”—which sounds like a made-up academic term that turns out to involve “anti-oppression” and “de-Westernizing.” Notice how so many grievances mimic Marxist class struggles. Why does radicalizing and dividing students over identity take precedence over, well, real inclusion?

The attacks were “in light of the orgy of occupation.” Those are the words of Mohammed Deif, military commander of Hamas. Iran’s (drone-stricken) Gen. Qassem Soleimani included Hamas in the “Axis of Resistance.” The United Nations has a Special Committee on Decolonization. Sound familiar? Occupation, resistance, decolonization—progressive talking points all.

The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1947 that the Soviet’s agenda was aided by korisne budale—useful fools, which has since morphed into “useful idiots.” While an overused expression, it fits this time. Those speaking of occupation, resistance and decolonizing are pure and simple useful idiots for terrorism, running interference and providing a rationale for depraved behavior. These witless nitwits have also aided Iran’s attempt to stop Saudi Arabia from joining the Abraham Accords. While many university presidents have since come out against the barbaric attacks, the damage has been done. A Great Discrediting has begun.

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to China, emailed the University of Pennsylvania’s president saying his family foundation will “close its checkbook” based on Penn’s “moral relativism” and “race to the bottom.” I’ve heard of alumni of Harvard and elsewhere mailing $1 bills to their alma maters—as in, “That is all you’re going to get.” Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman asked Harvard for the names of terrorist supporters so his firm could avoid hiring them. Boston University last month had an anti-antiracist backlash. “Defund the police” is becoming a distant memory.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/10/20/even-cnn-gets-what-the-biden-administration-doesnt-n1736759

When Biden announced that he was promising $100 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank, it was immediately clear to anyone with common sense that this money would end up in the hands of Hamas and not used for humanitarian purposes.

The Biden administration insists there will be safeguards in place to prevent this from happening, but no one really believes it will work—not even the pro-Biden CNN.

On Wednesday’s “Laura Coates Live,” CNN correspondent Hadas Gold and CNN military analyst Col. Cedric Leighton (Ret.) both agreed that preventing humanitarian aid from being seized by Hamas in Gaza would be extremely difficult because there are no mechanisms in place to ensure how the aid is distributed and used.

“Just, in hearing what he had to say about the conditions, really, of being in compliance or going along with what President Biden has said, the conditions about hostages being released, the ideas of how to ensure that the aid is not going to be essentially taken and siphoned off by Hamas. Is it realistic to think that could actually be a condition that could be met before aid gets there?” host Laura Coates asked.