RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/15/the-way-of-socialism/

Anyone who doubts that those in charge of the operation of Providence have a sly sense of humor needs only to ponder the sweet declarations emitted by our more pampered celebrities on the subject of socialism. I remember, for example, when the actor Jim Carrey told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.”

What a card! Were socialism to be instituted in the United States, one of the first things that would happen is that people like Jim Carrey—with an estimated net worth of $180 million—would be instantly pauperized. For what are the two fundamental pillars of socialism? The abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. And the cherry on top of this fudge sundae is that Jim Carrey actually starred in a movie called Dumb and Dumber, which is about “two unintelligent but well-meaning friends from Providence, Rhode Island.” Talk about art imitating life.

Let’s leave the latest incarnation of really-existing socialism—the country of Venezuela—to one side. That is a laboratory demonstration of what happens when you take a prosperous country and rigorously impose socialist policies on it. Jeremy Corbyn was partly right when he said the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez showed there was “another way” of doing politics and “it’s called socialism.”

Corbyn forgot to add: that way leads to universal immiseration and societal collapse, which is exactly what is happening in the once-rich South American country now. 

Is Joe Biden on the cusp of doing to us what Chavez did to Venezuela? To be frank, I do not think the American people will let him. But in the House of Fiscal Misery there are many mansions, and so far the actions of the Biden Administration have not been encouraging, as anyone who can pronounce the words “inflation,” “consumer confidence,” “energy prices,” or “taxes” knows full well. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/after-de-blasio-says-subways-safe-4-slashed-subway-daniel-greenfield/

You can set your clock by what New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio says as long as you want to be late everywhere and to everything.

“What’s happening right now is clearly at the instruction of the governor, MTA leadership is fearmongering,” de Blasio said in an interview Friday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’ve ridden the subways. So many folks in my life ride the subways all the time. They’re overwhelmingly safe,” the mayor said, adding that “there have been some incidents that truly are troubling.”

Here’s the latest “troubling incident”.

A group of men who are believed to have attacked at least four different people – slashing three of them – during a 12-minute violence spree on Friday morning

The first of Friday’s incidents was reported around 4:25 a.m., when a 44-year-old man riding a southbound No. 4 train was approached by two men, one of whom slashed him in the face, police said. The victim got off the subway at Manhattan’s Union Square Station.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-paranoid-style-in-progressive-politics

The other day I found myself staring at this headline in the New York Times: “GOP Focuses on Polarizing Cultural Issues in Drive to Regain Power.” For a moment, I thought the article would, in a commonsense way, explore how Republicans were confronting the polarizing cultural issues that had been created by liberals. That is to say, I thought the article would be about the hardball nature of American politics.

Instead, it presented Republican opposition to explosively controversial questions like packing the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and giving legal status to illegal immigrants as part empty cynicism, part mental imbalance. The reporter, Carl Hulse, portrayed the Republican resistance to such extreme Democratic initiatives as a determined effort to appease the “conservative base.” That’s a phrase that has become a Democratic mantra signifying chthonic forces of disorder, and it has the effect of halting in its tracks any political argument or debate.

Nowhere in Hulse’s report was there an acknowledgment that the Republican focus on these matters was a legitimate form of democratic politics—as robust, and constitutional, as the calculating Democratic manipulation of same. What’s more, Hulse noted that “Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats’ push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.” The article treats “systemic racism” as a settled historic fact, as though it were the institution of slavery in the antebellum South. But systemic racism—the assumption that white racism is fundamental to American identity—is not a settled historical fact, having been discredited by, among others, at least a score of distinguished liberal historians. And transgender rights are a complex matter, extending from protection of transgender people under the law to the question of transgender athletes—on which there is no consensus on the right—and the issue of sexual-reassignment surgery for children. But Republicans violently “hammer” at such settled questions “in a drive to regain power,” while Democrats gently “push to confront” and “safeguard” them in a spirit of truth and justice.