RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump’s declaration that opioid abuse is a public-health emergency is sparking debate about addiction. Tragically, myths and misinformation are blocking the path to preventing more deaths.

Start with the causes of the opioid crisis. On “Face the Nation,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, chair of Trump’s opioid commission, blamed over-prescribing doctors. “This crisis started not on a street corner somewhere. This crisis started in the doctor’s offices and hospitals of America.” That’s untrue, Governor.

It contradicts scientific evidence and lets drug abusers off the hook. At least three quarters of opioid-pill abusers and almost all heroin addicts got hooked without ever having been prescribed pain medication for an injury or illness, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Emergency-room records show only a fraction — 13 percent — of opioid-overdose victims began taking drugs because of pain, according to the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine. The media feature many stories about patients who needed pain killers and later became addicts, but these are exceptions, not the rule.

Experimenting with opioids — whether heroin or pills — is almost always a choice. A bad choice. Young adults account for 90 percent of first-time abusers. To protect the next generation from making that mistake, Trump proposes a “massive advertising campaign to get people, especially children, not to want to take drugs in the first place.” The liberal media mock Trump’s proposal as a throwback to the 1980s, but in fact he’s on the mark.

For decades, popular music has glamorized drug use. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel pays lip service to tackling tough political issues, but his guest line-up this week includes Ty Dolla $ign, whose music videos showcase drug use.

Trump’s offering an alternative message. History proves it can work. In 2012 and 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran hard-hitting and graphic ads against smoking, with ex-smokers talking about their own lung disease, cancer, and other miseries. The ads cut smoking among youth and convinced 400,000 smokers to quit for good.

Trump’s campaign should be just as terrifying. Show hospitalized teens with their arms amputated because of infections from heroin needles and brain-damaged overdose victims in nursing homes.

Warning about opioid abuse sounds like a no-brainer. So why do activists like Kassandra Frederique and Dionna King of the Drug Policy Alliance deplore “the persistent stigma of drug use”? As if we’re not supposed to hurt addicts’ feelings. With drug overdose deaths at record highs, that’s misguided.

You no longer see smoking in movies or on television. Stigmatizing cigarettes worked. So why de-stigmatize opioids? We can help those already hooked without doing that.

Christie calls addiction a “disease.” It’s true that some people succumb to it more than others. But new research suggests the disease metaphor could be hurtful. Addicts who believe they have the free will to quit have a much higher success rate than those who think of themselves as diseased, according to new research from the University of Minnesota and Florida State University. Quitting Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s isn’t possible, but getting off drugs is.

Harvard professor Gene Heyman insists addicts can choose to stop using drugs once “the penalties for excessive use become overwhelming,” such as losing their job or kids.

In these willfully ignorant, fiercely partisan times, let’s recall that we fought our bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million Americans died in a complex struggle that began to right an inexcusable injustice.

Now we’re re-fighting our Civil War with neo-Stalinist, fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of the dead. We rush to tear down statues of men we refuse to understand. We rob one group of citizens of their heritage to please another.

And the president’s chief of staff cannot state facts about our history without triggering mob-rule outrage from those who could not even tell you when the Civil War was fought.

Yes, slavery was the catalyst of our Civil War. Without slavery, sectional disagreements would have remained, but none would have brought us to make war on ourselves. Still Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly’s televised remark that “the lack of an ability to compromise” provoked our Civil War was also accurate. Despite repeated attempts by Northern states to find a political compromise, nothing satisfied Southern firebrands.

There’s much more to it, though. While slavery brought us to fratricidal war, that doesn’t mean everyone who wore a Confederate uniform fought for slavery. Quite the contrary. Rare was the Rebel soldier who owned a slave (as usual, the rich often stayed home).

Let’s judge the dead as we’re admonished to judge the living: as individuals. As a student of the Civil War since childhood, it astonished me when the media reacted to Kelly’s statement that Robert E. Lee was “an honorable man” as if Kelly had praised Pol Pot.

‘

Robert E. Lee was, in fact, a man of flawless honor in his times. He abhorred secession and viewed slavery as doomed. But when Virginia seceded from the Union, this hero of multiple wars felt compelled — as Kelly honestly noted — to defend his state, his family and friends. It was, for him and others, an anguished choice.

Nor was Lee alone in detesting secession. Many of the West Point-trained officers who became Confederate generals strongly opposed it. Jubal Early argued bravely against it. Thomas J. Jackson, soon to be known as “Stonewall,” preferred continued unity and peace.

Now students who have never taken a course in American history demonstrate to tear down statues of Jackson, a man who, before the war, defied his neighbors to start a Sunday school for blacks; who broke Virginia law by teaching slaves and free blacks to read; and who saved slaves from being sold into the Deep South. (Virginians, such as General-to-be Robert Rodes, were appalled by the treatment of slaves in the Cotton Belt.)

Jackson continued sending regular donations back to that Lexington, Va., Sunday school until he died of wounds.

The Leftist progressive movement has adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. White males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (the workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism is a departure because it relabels the players in the drama and defines culture as the metric of exploitation.

Cultural Marxism dominates the Leftist Democrat Party and explains their radical political platform that is taking aim at the established Judeo-Christian values which define American culture. The family, the Church, patriotism, traditional definitions of race, gender, and sexual identity are oppressive and must be dismantled and replaced with romanticized notions of one globalized world without political borders, country borders, sexual borders, or any other defined boundary.

Here is the problem. Classical Marxism and cultural Marxism both seek to replace an existing order with collectivism – they are selling their own idealized form of secular heaven on earth. The naive social justice warriors who sign onto this Leftist fantasy are too childish to examine the reality of the offer. They believe the fantasy of a Marxist paradise but the reality they are embracing is the state of powerless infancy – complete dependence in a world without boundaries and borders.

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment and is the foundation of rational thought. Critical thinking is dependent upon accurate information – it relies upon objective reality. The ability to remain in objective reality is threatened when fiction/fantasy (subjective reality) is presented as fact. It is impossible to make an informed decision without an accurate source of information.

Truth in lending laws exist to provide consumers with informed consent. Surgical consent forms and pharmaceutical labels equip patients with information to make informed decisions about their health. Product labeling, food labeling, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), are all attempts to provide consumers with accurate information to make informed decisions. Laws and labels acknowledge the existence of conflicts of interest and are attempts to level the playing field. What about conflicts of interest in politics? News? Social media?

Let’s consider the current reporting of the horrific jihadi attack in NYC on 10.31.17. Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbeki national admitted into the United States through the deadly “diversity” visa program, rented a truck and drove down the Hudson River bike path deliberately murdering and maiming innocent Americans. He murdered eight people injured dozens more then exited his vehicle shouting “Allah Akhbar!”

Predictably leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio (a cultural Marxist) refused to use the words Islamic terrorism or jihad and instead disingenuously called the attack a “cowardly act of terrorism.” “We know this action was intended to break our spirit. Our spirit will never be moved by an act of violence and an act meant … to intimidate us.” Similarly leftist cultural Marxist Governor Andrew Cuomo told the nation that this was the action of a “lone wolf,” and that “there is no evidence to suggest a wider plot or wider scheme.” REALLY? These two Leftist political responses are prime examples of the subjective reality that the Left is selling to America.

There is no such thing as a lone wolf. The term lone wolf is a misleading political misnomer – jihadists do NOT act alone – they are part of a worldwide Islamic ideological war against the West that seeks to destroy Western culture and replace it with Islam and sharia law. Politicians who are unable or unwilling to accept this unpleasant reality are unfit to serve. Americans need leaders with the ability to identify and act upon the threat. America needs objective reality. Saying you are safe and being safe are not the same thing. America needs leaders without a political conflict of interest.

In our digital age, we need a new word to describe the person we have unequivocally witnessed committing mass murder. To call Sayfullo Saipo a “suspect” is misleading – only one person was in the driver’s seat of the truck that sped down the west side highway, running over cyclists and pedestrians, ultimately killing eight and wounding at least eleven. He is seen on video exiting the truck after crashing it into a schoolbus, waving weapons and getting shot. Or, to be consistent, must we call the policeman the “suspected shooter”, compounding the lunacy of not spelling out what our eyes have seen. The only thing that remains unknown is under which category of slaughter Saipov will eventually be found guilty, but reading and hearing all the reporters continually refer to him as “the suspect” is a dishonor to the victims and their loved ones.

The other phrase we need to lose is “or the terrorists will win.” When multiple people die and are maimed in a savage attack, terrorists have won. Celebrating at a parade will not diminish the sorrow and agony of the victims’ survivors nor should it relieve any of us of whatever guilt we accrue by turning a blind eye to the obvious. Our police department prides itself on its outreach program to truck rental companies in the tri-state area, alerting them to the need for background checks on possible terrorists who want to turn trucks into murder weapons. This modus operandi has succeeded in killing 130 people and injuring close to 200 since 2016. Well, an immigrant from Uzbekistan walks into Home Depot in New Jersey with a swarthy complexion, a full bushy beard, a Muslim name of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, requesting a short term rental of a truck – what was missing from this profile that dissuaded the dispatcher from informing the counter-terrorism division that had done the outreach? Either John Miller, head of this division, has over-estimated its efficacy or we have been so brainwashed by the media that legitimate suspicion and profiling are considered Islamophobic. Perhaps the person who handled the rental was more anxious about his being called that than about the chance of a terrorist incident. That possibility should make us all ashamed that we have abandoned logic in favor of what began as an Islamic public-relations campaign after 9/11.

Profiling is not an act of discrimination; it is the means by which law enforcement aims to anticipate and minimize future criminal acts. It is based on analysis of past acts and behavior and is analogous to what a smart doctor does when she takes a history of your family background. If you are black and have a higher risk of sickle cell anemia, you don’t call your doctor racist for factoring that into her diagnosis. If you are Jewish, you get tested for the brca gene for breast cancer as an act of precaution, not prejudice. If 3,000 New Yorkers were killed on 9/11 in the name of Allah, we can never be called Islamophobic for worrying that other jihadists abound with similar motives. Sadly, some of our movers and shakers have succeeded in shaming us for this understandable , appropriate anxiety.

Finally, why didn’t our governor and mayor initiate a somber few minutes of silence at the outset of the Halloween parade to acknowledge the tragedy that had occurred less than a mile away. Grandstanding that we need to carry on with our jollity or the terrorists will win ignores a more powerful message. The terrorists don’t win when we remember our humanity, exhibit grief at senseless violence and show our compassion for innocent victims in our own home town.

After months of getting themselves worked up about hearings featuring a hero once accused of rigging the election for Donald Trump and Don Jr.’s inability to sniff out Nigerian prince emails, spectators of the Russia game have finally gotten what they wanted: indictments.

Unfortunately, the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates have nothing whatever to do with “collusion,” however broadly defined. Politically speaking, we have learned nothing except what we already knew: namely, that a shady businessman who briefly worked for the Trump campaign is, in fact, a very shady businessman indeed, one who has just pled not guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of the Ukrainian puppet government and not declaring all of his income derived from his essentially pro-Kremlin lobbying.

Dot connectors will, of course, continue to connect dots. It could be that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is hoping to secure testimony from Manafort or Gates that will give him the dirt he needs to bring more appropriate charges. It could be that he already has that information and is just waiting for goodness knows what occasion. At the very least, obsessives will say, the hiring of Manafort indicates — these comments almost write themselves — a very serious lack of judgment on Trump’s part. You don’t say? The man whose idea of a feel-good national unity speech following an act of domestic terrorism was to suggest a degree of moral equivalence between the KKK and its opponents has horrible instincts, often fails to think things through, is a bad judge of character, etc.? Gosh.

Even George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea is no smoking gun. The former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign admits that he lied about email exchanges with a shadowy figure known as “the professor” who had promised Russian “dirt” on Clinton. But as far as we can tell, his communications with Dr. Dirt went nowhere. Papadopoulos also made vague references in his emails to “meetings” with Russian officials that probably did not end up taking place, which seems important only if you ignore the fact that presidential candidates, especially after securing their parties’ nominations, routinely meet with foreign leaders, even heads of state.

The most significant thing about Monday’s Mueller bonanza is that it reminds us what is wrong with these hysterical wide-ranging special prosecutor investigations that take place in public. Whitewater went on for nearly a decade before it concluded in 2003. Does the fact that Bill Clinton lied about sleeping with Monica Lewinsky prove that he and Hillary and the McDougals broke the law in the course of their real-estate dealings in the late ’70s? If you ask enough people enough questions about enough topics, sooner or later you’re going to catch somebody in a lie. Monday’s revelations don’t in themselves mean anything other than that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department is keeping Mueller on a very long leash.

It needs to be shortened. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the presidential campaign of Donald Trump knowingly colluded with the Russian government in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2016 election, not to see whether any person even loosely connected with the former could be found guilty of any crime, including perjury. The resignation of Tony Podesta from the prominent lobbying group he founded in the wake of Manafort’s indictment suggests that we are getting very far afield indeed.

There are many problems with the Mueller probe, not least its show-boating obsession with keeping its business in the newspapers, but the biggest one is that its parameters were never well defined. What would count as actual collusion? Idle language is thrown around about people having “ties” to Russia or being “Kremlin-connected.” How do you define “Kremlin-connected”? What would be the broad equivalent in the United States from Russia’s perspective? A former congressman? Anyone who does business on K Street having a meeting? Defense contractors? Given the country’s autocratic structure, there are very few living Russian nationals of any wealth or distinction who are not “Kremlin-connected.”

Progressive obsessions with race and class blur individual achievement. Those of the past instead are judged as one-dimensional players, either good or bad based on their perceived liberalism as interpreted by 2017 standards.

The humane General James Longstreet and the racist General Nathan Bedford Forrest are equally culpable because they fought for the Confederacy. It doesn’t matter that Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist and trust-buster when few others were — because his views of imperialism were uncouth by our standards.

In contrast, the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is spared progressive hell, because her pro-abortion advocacy helped found what became Planned Parenthood.

The scary thing about contemporary progressivism is this reduction of individuals to cardboard cutouts, whose sins and saintly works fade before cosmic concepts of race and gender.

Making the Necessary Allowances
Exemptions work in the present, too. Leftists think that state-mandated equality is of such critical importance that illiberal means are sometimes excusable to achieve it.

For example, Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia is declared a danger to the republic. So the Steele–Fusion GPS file of unverified smears about a presidential candidate, based on bought Russian fabrications, is renamed as mere “opposition research,” a means necessary to stop a threat such as Donald Trump.

Another example is the current campus tendency to suspend constitutionally protected due process when students are merely accused of sexual assault, or to deny free speech in order to shield students from views they find illiberal.

Exemption is more than just normal human hypocrisy. It takes such contradictions to a cosmic plane and is far more effective than pseudo-confessionals and apologies, individual contextualization, claims of victimization, and blame-gaming that humans seek refuge in when caught in hypocrisies.

As a corollary, liberals can escape the ramifications of their own ideologies. They may place their personal interests “in context” by public professions of caring. Recently, liberal journalists Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier were exposed as long-time serial sexual harassers — or worse — a fact that many of their associates must have long overlooked, given their support for feminist agendas.

Next to exemption is the closely related doctrine of secular penance (or the cessation of punishment through purchased indulgences). It usually follows when the currency of exemption is finally exhausted. Personal sins are then absolved by assertions of liberal orthodoxies. When desperate and in extremis, liberals find absolution by promising to do compensatory liberal good works — feminism, environmentalism, and identity politics become their feel-good version of hair shirts, ashes, and fasting.

Had Ted Kennedy not been heir to a liberal dynasty and later pronounced the progressive “Lion of the Senate,” he might have somewhere along his career path been charged with everything from involuntary manslaughter to sexual assault — and on the latter grounds ended his career in the fashion of a Senator Robert Packwood or Bill O’Reilly.

We have seen plenty examples of both exemption and penance recently.

Exemption
Take the Uranium One deal. Most liberals knew that after 2008 Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2016 and thus, they hoped, complete a 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive trajectory.