RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/01/americans-unite/

Teachers, friends, and colleagues of mine from the Claremont-Hillsdale school (or “CHS,” after where most of us were trained, and many now teach) have spent years making a concerted effort to find common ground with fellow travelers on the Right who may be broadly understood as paleoconservatives. 

I’m happy to say that, to a large extent, the effort has borne fruit. Many paleoconservatives have been published in the Claremont Review of Books and American Greatness, while many Claremont and Hillsdale scholars (myself included) have written for Modern Age and The American Conservative. There is more cross-pollination and friendly dealing today between the two groups than ever, with each side attending and speaking at the others’ conferences and so on. I think we’ve even learned from each other. I know I have. Exposure to paleo ideas has influenced my thinking on trade, immigration, and foreign policy, among other subjects. 

My commitment, however, to the core tenets of the Claremont-Hillsdale school—which I consider to be nothing more (or less) than an attempt to understand Americanism, without any alterations or admixtures—has never shaken. That’s not to deny that I’ve become increasingly dismayed at the way this understanding of Americanism is often deployed, especially by what Charles Haywood of the excellent book review blog The Worthy House calls “the catamite right.” My own preferred term is “Cracker Jack Claremontism,” after the tiny comics that used to come inside the boxes of caramel corn. Too small for anything but a few pictures and words, and meant for little children, they had to convey a simplistic story very briefly. 

Over time, a fake, pulpy, distorted, thumbnail version of Claremontism took over large parts of the Right. Kids, and many grown-ups, who never even struggled through Federalist 1, 10, or 51—much less the vast numbers of other essential founding texts—confidently assumed they could summarize the whole thing in a few words and phrases. “Equality,” “liberty, “proposition,” “America is an idea,” “Constitution,” “nation of immigrants”—these were all you needed to know to understand not merely the founding but the whole country. 

To the extent that my school (or myself) had anything to do with propagating this garbage—and that extent is not zero—I sincerely apologize. Some of us have been trying to make amends by telling a fuller account of the story, emphasizing those points left out of the Cracker Jack comic, correcting old errors, and making new friends. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-con-against-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

One hundred days in, Biden’s radical presidency makes clear that his campaign was, in fact, a fraud.

‘ It’s the unspoken Biden formula,” reports Axios. “Talk like a rosy bipartisan; act like a ruthless partisan.”

Indeed, it is. And to this maxim we might add a few others. Talk like a moderate; act like a radical. Talk about normality; act like a revolutionary. And, at all stages, aggressively hide the ball. Progressive pundits have taken to saying that Biden poses a problem for conservatives because he is so “boring.” That’s one way of looking at it, certainly. Another is that he is a fraud. The man who ran on a return to normalcy — and whose party avoided unified Republican government by only 90,000 votes — now says he wants to be FDR. Heaven help us all.

If anyone truly thinks that Biden is “boring,” it is because, having been intoxicated by the Trump Show, they are looking only at this president’s style. One hundred days into Biden’s presidency, and there is scarcely a single part of American life that the man isn’t trying to change. At the latest count, he wants to spend 6 trillion new dollars; to raise taxes to their highest level in three decades; to raise the minimum wage to $15 nationally; to turn the Senate into the House and turn the Supreme Court into the Senate; to oversee a federal takeover of elections and the police; to force as many workers as possible into unions, while banning right-to-work; to prohibit the most commonly owned rifle in the United States; and much more besides. Some of this, Biden is now open about. Much of it, however, he is still not. That $2 trillion “COVID relief” bill you’ve heard about? It wasn’t really about COVID relief. The “Infrastructure” bill? It’s not really about infrastructure. The “Families” bill? You get the picture. Nor are the contents described accurately. Two hundred billion dollars in new spending on Obamacare. That’s a “tax cut,” apparently. “No increase” in the estate tax? Well, unless you count the step-up basis, which is really the whole game. It’s as if, having finally been elected president after 50 years in politics, Joe Biden has decided to push every priority his party ever failed to get through.

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/one-year-after-george-floyd-minneapolis

“There will never be cries to “say their names,” nor will enormous crowds of protesters ever demand “justice” on their behalf. Again, the unique political resonance of cop-on-civilian killing makes the outsized focus on those events understandable. But when you spend some time in the crime-surging Twin Cities looking into other victims of unjust violence, the disproportionality of the focus does make you think. ”

It would be foolish to deny that there’s a specific significance when citizens are unjustly killed by the police, as a jury in Minneapolis determined last week happened to George Floyd. Armed agents of the state funded by taxpayer money have special obligations, and that includes avoiding the unjust killing of citizens. When the killing is captured on video, an intense emotional reaction is doubly understandable.

But with the gigantic outpouring of global attention that the Floyd case received — and with virtually every major elite US institution united in both their condemnation of the death-inducing act, and their claimed resolve to continue doing unspecified reparative “work” — it would be foolish to not also notice the comparatively miniscule attention that other instances of unjust killings receive. If one unjust killing (Floyd) generates sustained, historic, society-altering attention, and hundreds or thousands of others generate virtually no attention, the reasons for that disproportionality have to reflect something about a society’s cultural and political priorities.

This is especially true in Minneapolis, where the tumult of the Floyd episode and its fallout has now lasted for nearly a full year. Because it simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.

“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)

The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree, as I can personally attest. See below.)