RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

On January 1, 2021, our progressive true-believer mayor, Bill de Blasio, began his eighth year in office. Since he is limited to two terms under current law, this will be his last year, unless something changes. Now that another crowd of progressive true-believers has just swept to power in Washington, it seems like an appropriate time to look at how the seven years of super-progressive government have served us in New York.

Recall that when de Blasio became Mayor in January 2014, he followed 20 years of at least nominally Republican mayors, Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and Mike Bloomberg (2002-2013). Those 20 years saw dramatic improvements in New York City’s fortunes, including reductions in crime (the murder rate, for example, fell by over 80%), and resumption of a healthy rate of population increase after previous declines. Would the progressive de Blasio instead bring about some kind of immediate disaster and collapse?

For better or worse, that’s not really how it works with bad progressive public policy. Instead of immediate disaster and collapse, what we see is gradual but steady decline, particularly when compared to other jurisdictions that follow policies of, for example, lower taxing and spending and disciplined law enforcement. Thus, in a post on November 4, 2013 — the day before the Election Day on which de Blasio was elected — I made this prediction:

The good news is that even the worst left-wing policies do not lead to immediate economic collapse, but rather to slow gradual decline. It took decades of Rockefeller/Wagner/Lindsay overtaxing and overspending before New York City lost 10% of its population in the 1970s. . . .

So on to an overview of de Blasio’s “accomplishments.”

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4181/Citizen-Trump.aspx

This engraving depicts the 1793 trial of Citizen Louis Capet. He had been stripped of his title, King Louis XVI, by those who presumed to judge him. The image, the event, seems relevant on contemplating the looming impeachment trial of Citizen Trump. After the failure of Congress to pause the counting of Electoral votes to permit due process in the contested states, we may see that President Trump was also stripped of his title by those who now presume to judge him.

Louis’ trial ended infamously in regicide by guillotine. However much baying there is for Trump’s head, such a remedy lies beyond Senate recourse. On conviction of impeachment, the sentence is removal from office. Donald Trump may have won re-election, but he has no office. Such a sentence, then, would seem to be an exercise in futility, only revolutionaries don’t have time for futlity. 

There are two forms of regicide, according to research by Meagan Montanari, author of an interesting essay titled “The Good King: Louis XVI as a Religious Figure and Martyr.”

She writes:

The first type is basically that of a usurper, only wanting to kill the current king so that he can take over the throne for himself. This first type leaves the monarchy in place, never thinking of the possibility of doing away with it.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/03/polling-and-the-truth/

The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly.

One of the venues of this putative extremist is Cato, which is a classical liberal magazine known for making fun of political correctness; his other preferred site is Blaue Narzisse, an educational website on which I, too, have discoursed on literary and philosophical topics. One would have to hang out for several years with the squad in order to be inclined to locate either of these literate publications somewhere on the far-Right. But then the German government and German media apply an expansive definition of the enemy—namely anyone not in line with Islamic, feminist, and LGBT activists or who fails to hate the German language and Western culture sufficiently.  

The Tagesspiegel also showcases a poll that, we are assured, deserves our full attention. Readers are asked whether the German government “is presently taking sufficient steps to deal with right-wing threats” or whether more drastic means are required to address this danger. About half of the respondents said they believe the government is doing enough to combat raging rightism; but the other half thinks there is a need for more governmental action.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/biden-state-dept-spox-calls-cops-blue-klux-klan-and-largest-threat-to-u-s-national-security/

Just a few short years ago, the newly appointed deputy spokesperson for the Biden State Department wrote that the police posed the largest national security threat in America—greater than that of ISIS or Russia—because they were committing “genocide” against Black Americans.

In a 2016 Facebook post, uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon, Jalina Porter wrote: “The largest threat to US national security are US cops. Not ISIS, not Russian hackers, not anyone or anything else. If ya’ll don’t wake up and rise up to this truth, the genocide against Blacks in America will continue until we are near extinct. That’s not the world I seek to live in or create for myself and those around me.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/03/when-or-if-comes-the-pushback/

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter Reformation of reformist and more zealous Catholics.  

The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring 20s were followed by the bleak, dour, and impoverished years of the Great Depression. 

The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.” 

So social, cultural, economic, and political extremism prompt reactions—and sometimes counterreactions.   

The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years (from 1993 through 2015) cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state. Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda were its pushback.  

The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset—or Trump himself—is as of yet unsure.  

Joe Biden’s tenure may mark a return to business as usual of the Bush-Clinton years. Or more likely, it will accelerate the current hard-left trajectory. 

Either way, it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders—a tactic candidate Biden condemned. 

On almost every issue—open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees—Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support. 

When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/greenfield-video-incitement-insurrection-and-frontpagemagcom/

This new webinar features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He researches Islamic terrorism, left-wing radicalism, and the decline of the free world.

Daniel discusses Incitement, Insurrection, and the Fascist Crackdown on Conservatives, unveiling how The Democrats and the media are launching an unprecedented campaign to eliminate the political opposition. 

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/our-incoherent-and-dangerous-diversity-talk-bruce-thornton/

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell midwifed “diversity” in the 1979 Bakke decision, this dubious notion has become ever more duplicitous and dangerous. By enshrining a superficial reduction of real-world diversity into the law, Bakke has given illiberal ideologies a tool for suppressing true diversity of minds and character to further their tyrannical power­­––which we’ve witnessed for decades, and is now culminating in today’s “cancel culture” and censorship by online oligarchs.

George Orwell’s dystopian future of Newspeak and “memory holes” is dangerously closer to becoming our tyrannical reality.

Like all tyrannies, today’s censorship and silencing of dissenting voices began with words being distorted to take on spurious meanings that serve factional political ideologies and interests. In 1978, Powell needed something to justify discrimination on the basis of race, proscribed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in order to salvage the affirmative action programs that had relied on illegal quotas to mitigate ethnic and racial disparities in hiring, contracting, and university admissions.

But the “diversity” that followed was the most superficial sort––physical appearance, the “yellow, red, and black and white” of the old Sunday School hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” As such it echoed the same specious arguments made for legal segregation, which was justified by the “scientific racism” that was becoming popular among cognitive elites in the late 19th century. It too was legitimized by a Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which legalized unconstitutional segregation’s fig-leaf of “separate but equal.”

Over the following years, it became obvious there was no evidence to support the alleged benefits that could make “diversity” a  “state interest” compelling enough to justify the obvious discrimination practiced by programs based on racial, ethnic, sex, or sexual preference identities. The same weakness vitiates the later, equally vague, truly Orwellian concepts such as “inclusion” or “tolerance.” These empty verbal vessels have been filled with a political ideology that seeks exclusion and intolerance of those whose politics are different from leftist progressivism’s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/04/dems-covid-19-bill-is-a-grab-bag-of-leftist-goodies-not-stimulus/

After a group of 10 Senate Republicans duly trudged to the White House on Monday to show their “bipartisanship” on yet another COVID-19 stimulus bill, President Joe Biden did the predictable: He looked at their outreached hand of political comity and spat on it. Just as well, since the only thing the Democrats’ plan will “stimulate” will be more debt.

Biden and his party were never really interested in bipartisanship at all, despite their claims to the contrary. The whole point of this choreographed Kabuki political theater was to humiliate the Republicans, who foolishly took Biden and the Democrats at their word.

Republicans had suggested a more-or-less stripped-down bill of “just” $600 billion, compared to the Democratic wish-list of $1.9 trillion, which includes such non-COVID-19-related items as a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, a $350 billion bailout for poorly run states and cities, $170 billion for K-12 schools and colleges, $25 billion for “rental assistance,” and so on. Democrats also want checks of $1,400 for most households.

Republicans seek checks of $1,000, but would exclude families with more than $50,000 in income from the handouts. Their spending on all other aid is roughly two-thirds what the Democrats seek.

In rejecting compromise, Biden gave Congress a green light to totally ignore Republican input by passing a stimulus package through reconciliation, not the normal budget process. That will require a simple majority of 51 senators, not a supermajority of 60, to pass.