RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/11/23/the-lefts-vigilantes-n1535953

Who would have thought that “across state lines” would have replaced “Donald Trump” as the Left’s favorite epithet? But whatever fans the flames, right? Anything to get the latest rounds of arson, looting and violence up and running. There’s a country to be destroyed, you know.

If you watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which originally aired what seems like a hundred years ago, you may recognize the name Shelby Foote. He was a Civil War historian who made frequent appearances during the series. He was very knowledgeable and his books are enjoyable to read. Like C.S. Lewis, Foote has a way of crafting a sentence that keeps you hooked and somehow is pleasing to the eye. Of course, given Foote’s southern origin, many critics automatically label him a Confederate apologist, without taking the time to see the nuance in Foote’s books. Foote tried to tell both sides of a story. And history can be messy and does not always favor the side in which we are interested. But then again, nuance is all but lost in the 21st century.

In the book Confederates in the Attic, author Tony Horowitz sat down with Foote for an interview and the subject of the Confederate flag came up. Foote commented:

“Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”

And so it goes. The “right-thinking” people of the Left would never sully their hands in dealing with their enemies directly. Even if they do not explicitly encourage burning car dealerships, looting stores, attacking police stations or beating up unsuspecting people on the street, they know that their rhetoric inspires and encourages it. They know that they have an army of angry, under-educated or willfully uneducated group of people, highly vulnerable to the power of suggestion — people who will burn down a city while Leftist leaders and media mavens gather at the Kennedy Center or the Met Gala to sip champagne as their colleagues and errand-runners try to convince us that a building engulfed in flames is a sign of a peaceful protest.

People who they hate are being attacked by people they care nothing about. Just like their enemies, their foot soldiers are inconsequential and expendable. And if a neighborhood has to lose small businesses or a supermarket, drug store, or for that matter lives, so be it. After all, the goal is just, right?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/22/i-hope-you-die-the-murderous-isis-jihadi-from-new-york-city-you-heard-nothing-about-n1535561

Ali Saleh, 28, was born and raised in the Jamaica, Queens neighborhood of New York City, in idyllic circumstances: according to court documents, he came “from a loving home, surrounded by parents and siblings, and was both educated and employed.” Yet despite the fact that we are constantly told that ignorance and deprivation cause terrorism, Saleh’s enviable upbringing didn’t prevent him from turning to the dark side. Wednesday, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison after pleading guilty to aiding the Islamic State (ISIS). He gives every indication of being as hardcore an adherent as the jihad terror organization ever had. And one question that no one seems to be asking is: Where did he get these ideas in Queens?

In addition to the 30 years for aiding ISIS, Saleh was also sentenced Wednesday to eight years and four months in prison for assaulting a federal correctional officer. According to the Justice Department, “on July 13, 2018, at approximately 12:35 p.m., while a senior correctional officer was retrieving trash through an access slot of Saleh’s cell, Saleh reached through the slot and slashed the officer with an improvised knife, lacerating the officer’s right forearm and damaging the officer’s radial nerve.  Saleh smiled at the officer and said, ‘I hope you die.’” Charming guy.

That was after Saleh amassed a long record of support for the world’s most brutal and murderous jihad terror group. Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, stated that “Saleh made numerous attempts to travel overseas to join ISIS, and when those efforts failed, attempted to assist others in joining the terrorist organization.”

Saleh made his loyalties abundantly clear. On July 10, 2014, he wrote online: “We are going to see a lot of be headings [sic] of American soldiers and I want front row seats.” Then on August 25, 2014, he declared: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.” Three days later, he added: “Lets [sic] be clear the Muslims in the khilafah [caliphate] need help, the one who is capable to go over and help the Muslims must go and help.” He also wrote: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_womens_march_beclowns_itself_with_an_almost_unbelievable_tweet.html

Leftism is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable economically, although nations must be destroyed before that fundamental truth emerges. Leftist revolutions also invariably eat their own. America is now witnessing that cannibalism and we can only hope the mutually assured destruction of leftism occurs before it succeeds in wrecking America. Today’s Exhibit A showing leftist cannibalism is a perfectly wonderful tweet from the Women’s March organization apologizing for offending people with the average dollar amount of its donations.

The Women’s March emerged after Trump was accused of “grabbing women by the [vulgarism].” I listened to the entire recorded conversation, and it was clear that Trump wasn’t saying he engaged in that conduct. Instead, he was making the point that, if you’re rich and famous, you can get away with anything. I’ve always imagined that, had the bus ride during which he was recorded not ended then, he would have added, “At least, that’s what Bill Clinton told me.”

In any event, an enterprising leftist made herself a symbolic little pink hat and put the pattern online. And so, the vulgarity of the Women’s March was born. Within a short time, because this was a leftist organization, the anti-Semites came to the fore, dimming the group’s luster.

Still, the organization continues to exist and, as is true for all political organizations, it’s constantly sending emails to people begging for money. In this case, the email apparently informed recipients that they didn’t need to send a lot of money. Really, any amount would do. But just as a guide, the average amount that supporters sent was $14.92.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/granholms_and_bidens_energy_clown_show_.html

Reassuring worried Americans that there will be enough oil for the Thanksgiving holidays, yesterday President Joseph Biden (D) informed a concerned citizenry of plans to release 50,000,000 barrels of oil from the emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to bring down high gas prices. 

Wow!  Fifty million barrels of oil!  That’s a lot of oil isn’t it, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm?  That should take care of America’s energy needs for quite a while right?   “How many barrels of oil does the U.S. consume per day?,” a reporter commonsensically asked. “I don’t have that number in front of me. I’m sorry,” Granholm replied.

Tech challenged, non-Department of Energy Secretary me managed to get the answer in front of me in less than five seconds, conveniently from Granholm’s own Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration’s site, discovering

In 2020, the United States consumed an average of about 18.19 million barrels of petroleum per day, or a total of about 6.66 billion barrels of petroleum.

Oh.  But…but…that means the extra 50,000,000 barrels is only about 2 1/2 days’ worth of extra petroleum — long enough to transport people to and from their Thanksgiving celebration, heat residences for the holiday and to cook all the extra and special holiday foods.  Then what?  How can that literal drop in the empty bucket from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve bring down gas prices, up 60% since last year?

Energy Secretary Granholm could not be reached for comment as the numbers were not in front of her.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/tearing-down-thomas-jefferson-over-slavery-is-moral-idiocy/#slide-1

Actually, Thomas Jefferson did a lot of good, even on slavery.

Y ou can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.

This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:

Historians who spoke to NBC News said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky interpretation of history. . . . “The president can raise the slippery slope, but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian who specializes in American Civil War history.

John Oliver:

I’ll tell you where it stops. Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer’s always . . . somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar heroin. You don’t just go, “Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?”

Actually, you do ask that, and this is why. Whatever Trump understood about history, he understood the madness of mobs better than Kevin Levin or John Oliver did.

Without rehashing here the whole debate over Confederate icons — which has been going on for years now and has been vigorously debated on this website, sometimes by me — the strongest argument for removing some or all Confederate statutes and monuments is that the Confederate cause was not just flawed in the way that many great Americans are flawed; it was actively wrong, and the people who supported it made the country worse, or at any rate tried to, and thus should never have been memorialized in the first place.