RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/09/yesterdays_sister_souljah_moment_todays_costly_silence_147159.html

President Biden’s quick trip to New York City was the perfect moment to assert a genuine commitment to public safety by calling out Manhattan’s left-wing prosecutor, Alvin Bragg. But Biden and his attorney general blew the opportunity. They said nothing, aside from the usual pablum about safe communities and guns coming in from out of state. That’s not enough, even in very liberal cities like New York.
 
Democrats simply aren’t trusted on crime. That’s hardly new, but it has become much more damaging politically now that voters consider crime one of their top issues. For years, the party has framed its policies as “pro-justice” and “anti-racism,” with little attention to “law and order.” Race gets pride of place, of course, because, in city after city, a disproportionate number of those arrested are African American, mostly young men.
 
Republicans say that what Democrats call “racial justice” really means “soft on crime.” More and more Independents are siding with Republicans on this issue. These critics not only demand safety for themselves. They point out that most of this rising crime harms law-abiding people in poor, minority communities. The arrest statistics, they say, reflect the hard reality of who commits crimes, not biased policing.
 
The parties’ sharply opposed views on crime, law enforcement, and prosecution have become central issues in American politics. It’s an issue that strongly favors Republicans.
 
Some three decades ago, Bill Clinton understood this political landscape and attacked the Democrats’ image head-on by calling out a black celebrity, Sister Souljah. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, she said, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton’s angry response reinforced a political argument he made during the campaign: he intended to deter crime by punishing criminals, severely if need be.
 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Just over a year and a half ago, June 8, 2020, I wrote a TOTD, “It’s the Culture Stupid.” It was two weeks after George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin’s knee. I wrote: “…the permitting of protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was right. The failure to confront and arrest violent rioters and looters was wrong.” It is that failure to distinguish between right and wrong – a failure to punish wrongdoers and to reward virtue – that haunts our nation and its people. Driven by a sanctimonious and intolerant “woke” community, the situation has worsened over the past twenty months.

In 1992, while advising Bill Clinton on his Presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush, James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The economy had entered recession in July-August 1990 but had recovered by the end of the first quarter of 1991. However, job creation lagged, so the recovery became known as the “jobless recovery.” Unemployment continued to rise into mid-year 1992, which provided Mr. Carville the opportunity to conceive a phrase recalled thirty years later.

What we face is more onerous. Economies go through booms and busts, while cultures are fundamental to who we are. A self-important, moralizing wokeism offers a new and different threat. Traditionally, our culture has been embedded in families – passed down from one generation to the next. It is confirmed in civil behavior, in our schools, churches and communities. It is institutionalized in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and reflected in Constitutional amendments. It has been enhanced as our country absorbed immigrants from all over the world. But the underlying rules and customs that allowed this country to survive and to thrive should persist – that we are all, no matter our race, ethnicity or gender, created equal and have equal protection under the law, that private property is protected, that we live in a nation of laws not men, that we should be judged by our character, not the color of our skin or gender, and that success is a function of merit, ability, effort and diligence, and that civility, respect and tolerance are necessary for a free, civil and democratic society to exist.

Like too many Jewish organizations, the ADL been taken over by radical leftists who have subverted its original mission by promoting a progressive ideology at the expense of protecting the Jewish community. As the recent Whoopi Goldberg incident illustrates, the ADL seems morally confused.

Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from The View for two weeks for saying that the Holocaust was about white people killing other white people. According to Goldberg — who was simply repeating current woke ideology — Jews are white, and so Hitler could not have hated them because of their race. The Holocaust was, she said, merely another case of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Jews who were shocked by Goldberg’s outburst were further shocked to learn that Whoopi Goldberg was actually using the ADL’s definition of racism.

A few years ago, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt redefined racism to align with woke ideology. Racism, the ADL declared, now meant the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

Under this definition, only white people can be racists. Acts of bigotry directed at whites — now including Jews — would not qualify as racism, and hate crimes committed by people of color would not qualify as racism. This definition of racism, which derives from an insidious ideology, has infiltrated the ADL and actually feeds anti-Semitism.