RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/10/crazy-2020-is-dead-long-live-crazier-2021/

The proper conservative response to last Wednesday’s violent entry into the Capitol and vandalism, as well as assaults on law-enforcement, is to identify the guilty parties and ensure they are arrested.

Such deterrence will prevent any future devolution from legal popular protests into thuggery. No constitutional republic can tolerate its iconic heart stormed, breached, and defiled.

Is Some Violence Worse than Others?

Of course, there is no such thing as “good” or “acceptable” violence of either Trump supporters or of the Antifa and BLM sort.

Yet the latter were largely exempt from any consequences for most of the summer—despite Joe Biden’s demagogic implication that the now multibillion-dollar funded BLM was treated harshly in comparison to the rogue Trump rioters.

Do we remember the authorities’ exemptions given to “warlord” Raz Simone and his armed thugs who, with absolute impunity, took over a Seattle “autonomous zone” known as CHOP or CHAZ, where four shootings and two deaths followed? Who exactly destroyed or vandalized thousands of state and federal public monuments—some in Washington, D.C.—and burned and looted hundreds of buildings with impunity?

Those who wrongly demanded to defund the police, now rightly deplore the lack of a Capitol police presence. Their only consistency is their own perceived political self-interest.

Biden himself rarely if ever, without exceptions, outright condemned the atrocious violence of Antifa and indeed contextualized it as an “idea”—a disincarnate entity that apparently could magically also burn and loot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/what-now-bruce-bawer/

I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined.

Worse, even, than Donald Trump, with all his insight, imagined.

He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.

Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.

The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people.” They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/driving-out-scapegoat-bruce-thornton/

After last Wednesday’s Trump rally at the Ellipse in D.C., some of the up to 100,000 present walked over to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to ratify the Electoral College vote. While there an even smaller number, a few hundred at the most, broke into the Capitol lobby, with some proceeding into a few Congressional offices.

So, a rally attended peacefully by the majority of people, was taken over by a small mob of knuckleheads and day-trippers who invaded the Capitol. Sadly, a woman and a police officer were killed, and three other protestors died from “medical emergencies.” Scores more including police officers were injured.

The police authorities in D.C. had bungled badly their security preparations, and bear a large share of the responsibility for this fiasco. But as always, the guilt lies with those who broke the law and should be punished. “The doer suffers,” as Aeschylus says.

But after five months of incessant rioting, vandalizing, and looting tolerated, ignored, rationalized, excused, encouraged, or even celebrated by the progressive Democrat leadership, media, commentators, mayors, and governors, this half-day-long violent episode is pretty far down on the list of civic mayhem––and the only one of hundreds of protests this year that was fomented by supporters of the President. Indeed, maybe security was light because Trump has conducted massive rallies for four years without any significant violence.

Reaction, however, to the Capitol riot has elicited even more-intense hysterical attacks on the President. Worse, now Republican and conservative lawmakers and commentators have indulged the bathetic rhetorical excesses that mechanically issue from Dems and NeverTrump Republicans skulking in digital hovels like The Lincoln Project and the Bulwark. They are demanding the President’s resignation, impeachment, or removal from office via the 25th Amendment, some preposterously professing anxiety that Trump will launch a Parthian nuclear strike as he leaves office.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/jaques-barzun-and-the-tragedy-of-race-thinking/

“This anxious wrangling which goes on about books and plays seems at times trivial but it is in fact fundamental. If democratic culture yields on this point no prospect lies ahead but that of increased animosity among pressure groups…”

The 1965 quote above is from Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), who made a very important contribution to the debate about racism and affirmative action. He issued a warning that went unheeded, and the explosive emergence of Black Lives Matter underlines the value of his advice.

Barzun grew up in a French household, where his parents conducted a modernist salon, and he completed high school in the US. He entered Columbia College in 1923, graduating four years later at the top of his class, then he taught at Columbia University and became a full professor in 1945, Dean of the Graduate Faculties in 1955, and the inaugural Dean of Faculties and Provost of the University in 1958. In his long career as a teacher, scholar and administrator he wrote, edited or translated some 40 books.

His first serious research was a dissertation on class and race in pre-revolutionary France, published some years later as Race, A Study in Modern Superstition (1937).  This was not written as a tract for the times because it grew out of research on cultural history that started long before Hitler became a significant figure. Barzun claimed the protracted dispute in France over the “race” of the nobility versus the bourgeoisie became one of the divisive factors that contributed to the French Revolution. Moreover “race-thinking” persisted after the Revolution as a component of the struggles between nations, political parties, religious faiths and social groups. For Barzun, “race-thinking” is one of the ways to justify collective hostility and it is most dangerous and powerful when it  operates in partnership with other motives such as the nationalism of the Nazis, the  socialism of the communists and, nowadays, the radicalism of Black Lives Matter.