RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-criminal-protesters

Civic engagement and an appetite for protest are crucial to America’s success. Our Founders were keenly aware of this dynamic—it’s how our country gained independence—and secured the people’s right to assemble peaceably by ratifying the First Amendment.

Recent events within walking distance of my home have shown that some in our country are unfamiliar with, or do not care about, protesting peaceably. Perhaps they feel that their cause is so righteous that they can ignore norms and even laws. Perhaps they act criminally because they know that they are unlikely to be prosecuted. The answer probably falls somewhere in between, highlighting two serious issues in America: the decline of peaceful protest and the unequal enforcement of the law.

On July 24, during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, protesters filled the streets of Washington and laid waste to historic monuments outside of Union Station. The pro-Hamas activists vandalized a monument to Christopher Columbus and desecrated a replica Liberty Bell with phrases like “welcome to the intifada” and “anarchy.” They also assaulted police and removed the American flag from its pole, burning it and replacing it with a Palestinian flag.

It’s little surprise that they acted in this manner. Earlier this summer, a similar group of pro-Palestine demonstrators defaced Lafayette Square, just outside of the White House. The vandals graffitied anti-Semitic and hateful messages such as “death to Israel”  onto statues and walked away without consequence. Those sympathetic to the anti-Israel movement were doubtless emboldened by the lack of legal accountability that day and felt it would be permissible to deface other federal statues and public property on future occasions.

Their perception was partially vindicated in the days after the Union Station protest. While some were properly arrested at the demonstration, nearly a dozen have seen their charges dropped, and others were released from jail pending further court action. That is more enforcement action than occurred at the Lafayette Square protest, but not nearly enough to deter the next round of violent demonstrations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/everything_in_moderation_especially_government_power.html

Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.

One of the most important lessons in life is straightforward: everything in moderation.  If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.  If you drink too much, you’ll lose your wits.  If you play too much, no one will take you seriously.  Temperance is a remarkably sound philosophy for living well.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace. 

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_stranglehold_of_censorship.html

With Artificial Intelligence we have finally arrived in a world of 24/7 censorship, a place where thought itself can be molded, where whole societies can be pushed and pulled like taffy in any direction or shape desired. If you doubt that this is occurring it is only because you are unaware of the influence, not because it doesn’t exist. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end.

AI machine learning can control narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools can shape thought and action.

Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion. Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO ‘researchers’ like EIP, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars, these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.

State Department officials lobbied their counterparts in Europe to pass hate speech censorship laws that would boomerang back onto the U.S. A vague 2017 German law turned private social media companies into overzealous censors, with no judicial oversight or right to appeal. In 2022 the EU censorship law called the Digital Services Act created a frenzy of self-censorship by adding steep penalties for disinformation on platforms, all adjudicated by the government.

The UK has overtly criminalized “dangerous” thoughts and speech with fines and jail time penalties. The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress.” You can’t get much more vague and opinion-based than that. Who judges which ideas or speech are crimes? The police who investigate, and the Crown Prosecution Service. No chance that could be politicized or abused. The debate now is whether something said privately in one’s home should be criminalized. That anyone thinks that’s a good idea is frightening.