RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/a_brief_history_of_the_unrelenting_assault_on_conservatives_as_violent_extremists.html

The assault on conservative Americans began several decades ago with attacks on traditional principles and values. Belief in individual liberty and responsibility, free enterprise, and the rule of law was willfully conflated with “right-wing extremism.” Pride in America, a desire to protect our borders, and opposition to illegal immigration was branded as xenophobic. Championing the constitutional right to bear arms was decried as gun-crazed zealotry. Belief in religion, natural law, and the sanctity of human life was maligned as backward and anachronistic.

This vilification of conservatives has coincided with a deliberate shift from the real threats: radical Islamic and leftist groups. Islamic terrorist attacks have been declared as having “nothing to do with Islam” or excused by spurious claims that the perpetrators were mentally ill or misunderstood religious doctrine. When a military psychiatrist massacred 13 people in Fort Hood yelling ‘Allahu akbar’, it was dismissed as “workplace violence.” And the violence, arson, destruction of public property, and killing of citizens and police officers unleashed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the ‘Summer of Love’ are described as “mostly peaceful protests.”

Top Democrats haven’t shied away from embellishing the false narrative of a serious domestic terrorism threat from “right-wing extremists.” On his campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama demeaned working-class voters hit hard by job losses, saying, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His statement aptly served the purpose of pillorying conservatives.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/07-08/americas-great-awokening/

“What, exactly, has gone awry in the Land of Lincoln? For starters, America’s liberals-cum-progressives, including Maher himself, have discarded traditional liberal notions about the sovereignty of the individual. American-style liberalism has committed the Aggregations Fallacy of indiscriminately combining one “good” with another “good”—the rights of the individual with the rights of the group. In an earlier revolutionary era, explained Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism, the Jacobins fervently promoted liberté and égalité without appreciating the conflicting nature of the two concepts, and so ended up with Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”. Today, extrapolating from Scruton, we are witnessing a “despotism of identity”. 

Today not even the stalwarts of American liberalism-cum-progressivism are safe from what television pundit Bill Maher calls the “woke mob”. In an episode of his HBO program Real Time, for example, Maher cited the circumstances of Emmanuel Cafferty, who last year lost his job at San Diego Gas & Electric after being photographed in the vicinity of a Black Lives Matter protest “allegedly flashing a white power gesture”. Cafferty, as it turns out, had been making his way home from work in a company truck when a (white) BLM supporter, David Bentley, snapped a picture of Cafferty’s hand formulating—or seeming to formulate—the OK gesture out of the open cabin window.

Bentley, a quintessential keyboard social justice warrior, posted the offending hand gesture, construed as a sign of white power, on Twitter. He next contacted San Diego Gas & Electric with a link to the “evidence” that one of its employees was a white supremacist. Management terminated Cafferty’s employment. Cafferty, as it happens, is a person of colour and a supporter of BLM, who has a lifelong habit of extending an arm and cracking his knuckles one finger at a time. Irritating, yes, but not exactly an endorsement of white supremacism. Maher concluded his diatribe against the injustice of Emmanuel Cafferty’s sacking and an assortment of other cancel-culture incidents with this barb: “Memo to social justice warriors. When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.”

I doubt that Maher understands the root cause of cancel culture, but he at least appreciates its brutal potential. America’s self-styled Defender of Liberal Principles is aghast that a good and honourable person—that is, a person who shares his progressive feelings—should find himself the target of public shaming for not always having been so enlightened: “Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged or said in passing, or now even just witnessed. Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990—and you didn’t do anything.” The fanaticism of the woke mob, empowered by the omnipresence of social-media platforms, makes everyone a potential victim: “Andy Warhol was wrong … In the future, every­one will not experience fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of shame.” Not even the Great Emancipator himself is safe. “[Lincoln] is now cancelled in San Francisco. And they’re thinking about it in Illinois. Yes, the Land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-vanishing-legacy-of-barack-obama

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

— Leo Tolstoy

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:

It’s all about you
Girl tonight it’s about you…
Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.