RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/we-dont-have-gumption-civil-war-bruce-thornton/

This new year we’ve heard a lot of talk from the Left about another civil war just over the horizon. The partisan divide, as the argument from the Guardian goes, has worsened to the point that the “American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible . . . The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over.”  The Right knows this, the Guardian warns, but the Left is mired in intramural quarrels. As John Sexton summarizes this argument, “We need to burn down everything (including the Constitution) and start over.”

Much of this melodramatic prophecy bespeaks the progressives’ anxiety over the coming November electoral backlash against their manifest political failures and arrogant assaults on our unalienable rights, from tyrannical covid mitigation policies, to blatantly racist, anti-American school curricula. And for over a century, progressive technocrats have thrived on existential crises real and imagined, the “moral equivalent of war,” as William James put it in 1906, that demands expanded government power and diminished citizen freedom. Prophecies of actual war reflect the progressives’ habit of using hyperbolic rhetoric to gin up the panic and fear that justify increasing the nanny-state’s aggrandizement of more power.

But such prophecies are unlikely to come true, if only because most of the American people don’t have the gumption to kill and die for much of anything. The young who usually do most of the fighting in war particularly are––with the exceptions comprising our armed forces and other young patriots–– unsuited for the suffering and sacrifice that real war exacts.

First, however, we should point out that the laments over our “polarization,” “partisan rancor,” and lack of “bipartisanship” as comprising a novel, dangerous crisis hurtling us to war, bespeak an ignorance of both history and the structure of our political order.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/12/bareshelvesbiden-saved-christmas-but-not-the-new-year/

Just before the holiday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki took to the press room podium to laughably brag about how “we’ve saved Christmas” because President Joe Biden supposedly fixed the nation’s supply chain crisis. She said that “President Biden recognized this challenge early, acted as an honest broker to bring key stakeholders together, and focused on addressing practical problems across the global supply chain.”

That was good enough for the mainstream media, which had turned a blind eye to the supply chain problems once Biden claimed he had a plan to fix it.

Except, less than three weeks later, #BareShelvesBiden is trending on Twitter, shoppers are sharing pictures of empty store shelves, and the media are being forced – however reluctantly – to report that shortages are actually a worsening problem.

Shortages are everywhere. Whether it’s goods, food, people, COVID tests, you name it. The CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain is warning of meat and egg shortages. The Daily Beast reports that “shortages of glass and other materials continue, coupled with extensive shipping delays and skyrocketing freight costs.” One site asked readers to send examples of shortages, and cold medicine was in the top five.

A newspaper in Cape Cod finds “empty grocery shelves and downsized restaurant menus rising amid supply chain struggles.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-and-our-poisoned-politics-11641944998?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

This week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of our age. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were true or false. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.

The pathetic media excuse for running with the story was that important people in the government were talking about it. And no one wanted to talk about it more than the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. He kept talking about it even after his department had failed to corroborate it, and even though the CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”

On this day five years ago, Mr. Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Mr. Clapper from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable and were not relying upon its claims, which had been compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-with-joe-biden-or-jefferson-davis-georgia-voting-rights-filibuster-11641943418?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Every official in America, President Biden said Tuesday, has a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [ Martin Luther ] King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?” Seriously, he said that grandiloquent nonsense.

Mr. Biden’s speech in Georgia was a call to bulldoze the Senate’s filibuster to pass a rebranded version of H.R.1, a bill that would impose a federal election code on all 50 states, including forcing them to count late mail ballots that lack postmarks. If you happen to think that’s a bad idea, or that it’s unconstitutional, or that nuking the filibuster would hurt the Senate, well, then apparently you’re against Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Biden’s demagoguery is all the worse because he continues to distort state voting laws like the one in Georgia. “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote,” he said, adding “they’re limiting the number of dropboxes and the hours you can use them.” Georgia had zero dropboxes before the pandemic election of 2020, and now they’re enshrined in permanent law. This isn’t “ Jim Crow 2.0,” no matter how many times Mr. Biden uses that incendiary phrase.

People disagree about the security of stand-alone dropboxes, but voters can also put absentee ballots in the mailbox. As for Georgia, all of its residents can request a mail ballot without giving an excuse, unlike in New York or Delaware. And here’s a figure Mr. Biden should know: In 2020, the Census Bureau says, black voter turnout in Georgia was 64%, compared with Massachusetts’s 36%.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-way-out/

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Overland Park, Kansas, on November 18, 2021.

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study.

Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism

To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation. You might give it rule-making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more “independent” agencies—meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.

This much has been done. It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading. The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works. Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected. But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head? Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.

Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take—has taken—decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates. But once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.

What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world? There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time. They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable. But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody. This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved. The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest. This has not happened before. The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.