RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/eric-adams-and-the-promise-of-pragmatism?skip=1

In his victory night speech in New York City, an electrified Mayor-elect Eric Adams reserved his most scathing criticism not for his Republican opponent but for outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio. “This city betrays New Yorkers every day, especially the ones who rely on it the most,” said the incoming 110th mayor. Such pointed criticism might be expected when a candidate from one party succeeds an officeholder from the other party, but it sounds strange coming from one Democrat following another. After eight years of governance that placed ineffective progressivism over pragmatism, could the Adams administration represent the possible emergence of a moderate, results-oriented faction in New York’s nearly hegemonic Democratic Party?

November’s inflection point was reminiscent of others in Gotham’s more recent past. Following Rudy Giuliani’s winning reelection bid in 1997, the New York Times opined that his success signified “a triumph of nuts-and-bolts pragmatism over the ideology and party loyalty that once ruled elections in New York.” But Bill de Blasio’s 2013 victory saw the pendulum swing back. The Times suggested that this election marked a “forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.”

Unlike the 1990s and 2000s, when Republican candidates could win major mayoral elections, Democrats today possess almost unilateral control over most large American cities. New York is chief among them. That may change someday, but in the meantime it’s important to recognize the influx of some 1.5 million more residents since the Giuliani days, many of them educated and motivated professionals who tend to identify as liberal and dislike the national Republican brand. Buoyed by these voters, New York’s Democratic Party sanctioned measures to close Rikers Island, end pretrial detention for many defendants, shift $1 billion of the NYPD’s budget to other services, and impose higher taxes on wealthier citizens.

One might conclude that New Yorkers’ everyday priorities are tilting ever leftward, but that would be mistaken. A closed primary erodes the benefits of remaining Republican or Independent, leading many moderates to break ranks. Last year, 67,965 unaffiliated voters and 20,528 Republicans switched allegiances in the Empire State to become newly minted Democrats and thereby participate in the now all-important primary. The vastly lopsided ratio of Democratic to GOP voters doesn’t necessarily reflect the shared ground that underlies most urban voters’ preferences and concerns.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/29/the-left-doesnt-own-minority-voters/

Demographic transitions present political opportunities, but do not protect politicians from their own folly. The shift in most Western countries to a more racially and ethnically diverse demographic has been widely seen by left-wingers as an opportunity to cement their ascendancy.

Yet after early successes with this strategy, the parties of the left have witnessed the departure of some minority voters – Hindus in Britain, Asians in Australia, and Asians and Hispanics in the United States. In some cases, minorities are opting out of the intersectional bandwagon, which includes certain cultural attitudes, imposed progressivism in schools, and an increasing tolerance of crime.

Sadly, racialism and constant campaigns to address ‘systemic racism’ have driven a certain element of working-class whites not only in Trumpian America, but also in France, Britain, Germany and even Scandinavia, towards nativist, even openly racist, politics. As Michael Lind among others suggest, the fashionable focus on ‘white privilege’ and assigning original sin based on someone sharing DNA with settlers and slave owners also doesn’t work with the majority of Americans, who come from families who came to America after the Civil War. Meanwhile, crowing about ‘the end of white America’ might be popular in ethnic-studies departments, but it does not translate into a better life for most minorities.

Racial minorities’ shift to the centre and the right represents a healthy step, as it undermines the racialist, us-versus-them rhetoric shared both by the nationalist right and the intersectional left. Once politicians begin addressing people as people, with their own interests, and not as artefacts of their own heritage, we can look to employ diversity not as a weapon, but as an asset.

When you ask them, most people of colour do not generally share the politics of the faculty-lounge racialists. Nor do most Americans. The overall PC agenda, built around identity politics, is rejected by 52 per cent of Americans, according to a recent NPR poll. Opposition to PC is even greater among Latinos. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the woke anti-racist meme, even as it is widely adopted by the billionaire class and corporate HR departments.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/watch-out-academia-has-declared-war-military-history-198117

Fewer and fewer major universities promote world-class work in the military history field.

Here’s What You Need To Remember: In today’s great power competition, knowledge, critical thinking and prudent judgment are as vital as military hardware, artificial intelligence, and powerful economies. In our hyper-competitive world, we need all hands—and brains—on deck.

Distinguished war historian Max Hastings recently lamented, “In centers of learning across North America, the study of the past in general, and of wars in particular, is in spectacular eclipse.” This created a bit of a buzz among “classically” educated national security professionals—i.e., those who learned the blocking-and-tackling basics of their field through the study of history.

But this “buzzing” matters little. While they would like history to be used to help keep America safe, free and prosperous, these folks don’t control how history is taught and propagated. That’s controlled by American academia, American universities have no intention of fixing the problem. Instead, they are unilaterally disarming America’s knowledge base.

Crisis! What Crisis?

Fewer and fewer major universities promote world-class work in the military history field. There are probably two basic reasons for that. One is that, in this field, universities mostly function to produce scholars for other universities. As the demand for such academic scholars dissipates, so do universities’ investments in the field. And it’s a field particularly unattractive to foreign “investors.”

U.S. universities rake in billions in foreign investments. China alone averages a billion dollars a year. Pretty much all of it goes to hard science and engineering. Military history goes empty-handed.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/12/29/the-morning-briefing-dems-will-take-an-even-harder-run-at-destroying-america-in-2022-n1545096

Let’s get back to the Dems and their antics now.

As I am often given grief for frequently reminding people, we’re still less than a year into Biden’s God-awful tenure in the Oval Office and what potential relief we have on the horizon is still almost a year away. I mentioned in yesterday’s Briefing that eleven months could very well feel like eleven years. I sincerely hope that’s not the case but I’m a realist.

One thing I know for certain is that the Dems are in an all-around panic about next November. Sure, a lot can happen between now and then but, look around, this Biden mess most likely won’t be cleaned up by then.

Democrats are more focused on the long game than Republicans, however. Just because they’re down in the dumps at the moment doesn’t mean that they’re taking their eyes off of the various insane leftist prizes that they want.

My latest column dissects an Op-Ed that appeared in The Hill yesterday, and it perfectly illustrates just how focused the Dems still are. Here’s an overview:

A professor of politics named John Kenneth White has penned an opinion piece for The Hill titled “The Constitution isn’t working.” It’s an odd article because White actually gets a couple of things right at the beginning but eventually veers off into a boilerplate regurgitation of the leftist fever-dream wish list: nuke the Electoral College, JANUARY 6, reform the filibuster…yeah he had a ghostwriter from the Democratic National Committee working with him on this.

There were some valid points that professor White could have explored differently and given readers some real food for thought. It’s nigh on impossible for any Democrat to do something like that, however, because they are all basically automatons when it comes to the approved messaging. Here’s a snippet from near the end of White’s article that I didn’t include in mine:

It won’t be enough merely to reform the filibuster, add more justices to the Supreme Court, change presidents or surrender presidential powers to Congress. A document written in 1787 is inadequate for the 21st century. The Electoral College is poised to create more misfires, with popular vote winners not becoming president, as has happened twice already this century. Territorial expansion has resulted in 16 percent of the U.S. population controlling half the seats in the U.S. Senate.

He not only wants to blow up the Constitution, he then wants to blow it up a second time just to make sure.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/28/the-everlasting-covid-crisis/

In 1972, three black men, Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson, Jr., hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49, demanding $10 million and safe passage to Cuba. The hijacking lasted nearly 30 hours and involved multiple stops throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually, Cuba. In the process of negotiating with the FBI, the hijackers threatened to ram their aircraft, a Douglas DC-9, into the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee if their demands weren’t met.

Until that point, American airlines had resisted installing metal detectors in airports, worried that treating Americans like common criminals to board a plane would wreck their burgeoning industry. But that threat of nuclear attack, and the 130 other hijackings between 1968 and 1972, convinced the government to take a stand at last. In 1973, the FAA used its bureaucratic and administrative powers to make passenger screening mandatory. In 1974, Congress validated the requirement, ignoring passenger rights’ groups that protested the intrusive screening of luggage and persons in order to board aircraft. 

There is an important lesson here: Once the modern American state imposes surveillance measures it never relaxes them, even when the threat no longer exists. That’s why, even after American troops have left Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden was killed, and ISIS has been destoyed, Americans are still removing their shoes in airports, treated like would-be terrorists for traveling. The humiliating X-ray machines that force grandmothers, children, and ordinary businessmen alike to stand like felons with their hands up while probing machines attempt to peek under their clothes at their naked bodies is the height of ritual humiliation.

The seeming elimination of this surveillance network’s reason to exist doesn’t mean these leftover policies of the war on terrorism are over—far from it! My children and grandchildren, barring some dramatic political shift, will be subject to the same post-9/11 security measures I grew up with. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/us-so-stupid-don-feder/

Bette Midler should wear a name tag that reads, “Hi, I’m a super-rich, Hollywood elitist who thinks Red Staters are sub-human.” But that would be superfluous.

After Sen. Joe Manchin announced that he could not support Biden’s $4.5 trillion Build Back Better/Socialism Forever Plan – which would have been gas on the raging fires inflation (now at almost a 40-year high) – Midler attacked his West Virginia constituents as “poor, illiterate and strung out.” I’m surprised she didn’t add something about their teeth and the marriage of first cousins.

Personally, I would rather live next-door to the average West Virginian than the typical denizen of Beverly Hills. (See, Bette, even though I voted for Trump twice, I can use big words.) Being called illiterate and strung out by a member of the entertainment conglomerate – who generally have the IQs of gnats and are only occasionally sober — is, to say the least, ironic.

This is not about the calorically-challenged, hideously unattractive, singer/ whatever, but the way “progressives” view us, and why the left is increasingly dangerous to life and liberty.

Bette’s tirade is only the latest chapter in the left’s war on normalcy. Back in 1993, the Washington Post described conservative Christians as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

I wrote at the time that I was a Jew who identified with the political agenda of the Christian right, owned several pairs of shoes, graduated from an East Coast university, was admitted to the practice of law in two states and considered myself an independent thinker, guided by reason.