RUTHFULLY YOURS

. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/21/cancel_culture_and_the_historical_illiteracy_that_fuels_it_143757.html

Amid the debate over America’s monuments, a new poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of voters disapprove of the removal of historic statues perceived by some as offensive. The poll, which equally surveyed registered Democrats and Republicans, showed that 74% of respondents agree with President Trump that monuments should not be removed.

It remains unclear how the controversy will affect the November election. Already, this summer has been upended by an extraordinary series of events, including the ongoing public health crisis and protests in response to the tragic death of George Floyd. What began as an outcry against abuses by police has led to unprecedented soul searching about the issue of race in America, including the propriety of statues honoring the nation’s former leaders.  There are understandably strong feelings over the display of statues that honor leaders of the Confederacy, but the recent indiscriminate destruction of statues and monuments resembles a dystopian plot line about suppressed history and silenced dissenting voices.

Understanding the current cultural context is key to understanding the controversy surrounding America’s statues. Defacing and vandalizing public memorials are the latest manifestation of the “cancel culture” that seeks to punish individuals for past actions or views ranging from unjust to merely out of step with today’s prevailing zeitgeist. Recently, this illiberal crusade instigated the outing of Boeing Communications Chief Niel Golightly, who resigned after a colleague complained about a 1987 article he wrote arguing that women should not serve in combat. Despite Golightly’s change of view, Boeing forced him out.

Others, including comedians, politicians, and even pastors have had to scramble to atone for whatever landed them outside the good graces of the cultural elite. While the cancel culture movement is problematic for many reasons, the latest trend to “cancel” historical figures especially underscores the consequences of historical illiteracy.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right

In August, 2005, Rolling Stone sent me to cover a freak show. In a small Pennsylvania town called Dover, residents contrived to insert a sentence about teaching “intelligent design” into the curriculum, and fought for its right to do so in an extravagantly-covered trial in the “big city” capital of Harrisburg.

Dover’s school board president, Alan Bonsell, was a fundamentalist who believed God shaped man from dust. It was said Bonsell would stand at his window at night, wondering, as he gazed at the stars, at the intervening hand of God. “If you can’t see that, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he said. His wife supposedly told him he looked like Chuck Norris.

The bureaucratic atmosphere Bonsell presided over was not kind to the eggheads trying to teach. When the head of the district’s science department, Bertha Spahr, begged the board not to promote “intelligent design,” listing past Supreme Court decisions about religion in classrooms, another fundamentalist board member named Bill Buckingham – an ex-cop who wore a lapel pin in the shape of both a Christian cross and an American flag – shouted her down. “Where did you get your law degree?” he snapped. Author Laurie Lebo in the book The Devil in Dover described what happened next:

Neither Nilsen nor Bonsell spoke up to address Buckingham’s rudeness to the thirty-year veteran teacher. Spahr pulled back, shocked, and then sat down without saying a word.

It was after this meeting in October, 2004 that a passage about teaching “gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory” was inserted into the curriculum. The science geeks fought back, however, and roughly a year later I sat in a packed courtroom with overeducated reporters from all over the world who came to gape at the spectacle of rural ignorance showing its rump in an American courtroom.

When a Christian attorney named Robert J. Muise tried to cross-examine the smooth-talking Superstars of Science who’d flown in from places like Brown and Harvard to denounce “intelligent design,” journos murdered their thesauruses looking for new words for “hayseed.” The chuckling press section felt like front row of a comedy club.

Dover’s failed school board rebellion inspired multiple books, law review articles, and films, including a Nova doc that won a Peabody award. For decades, whether in Arkansas or Texas or Louisiana, every time even a small group of fundamentalists tried bullying teachers via this stacking-the-school-bureaucracy trick, northern press heathens would descend in mammoth numbers. Especially in 2005, which felt like the dawn of a new thousand-year reign of Bushian conservatism, liberal audiences jumped at any opportunity to re-create the magic of one of their foundational knowledge-over-superstition parables, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/portland-riots-trump-constitution-law-andrew-mccarthy

“[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Constitution says that’s the president’s job, but we’re not hearing much about that from the chattering classes.

We hear plenty of bloviating from the media-Democrat complex, dutifully masquerading the rioting in Portland as “mostly peaceful protest.” And there is no shortage of faux outrage over President Trump’s purported trampling on state sovereignty by dispatching federal agents to address the mayhem.

But we don’t hear much about the Constitution … including from politicians, such as Senator Rand Paul, R., Ky., who are wont to pose as constitutionalists.

The provision quoted at the top of this op-ed is from Article II, Section 3. It imposes on the president of the United States the duty to execute federal law.

The Constitution says the president shall perform this obligation. We’re not talking about an option or something he may do or not do as he sees fit. It is a solemn duty. It is what being the chief executive is all about.

The president has two principal, closely related responsibilities: to provide for national security and to see that the laws are enforced.

The latter duty very much includes the protection of federal property and the execution of laws Congress has constitutionally enacted to address violent crime.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/20/fbi-knew-collusion-was-a-nothing-burger-but-kept-fake-scandal-alive-anyway/

‘We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Russian intelligence officers].”

How much wasted time on pointless investigations could have been prevented had Peter Strzok, then one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence officials who was spearheading the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation, said this publicly one month into President Trump’s term?

But no, it was a private note by Strzok, for consumption within the FBI, to debunk a Feb. 14, 2017, New York Times article. The news story, a compilation by five of the Times’ top reporters, working four unnamed sources (the usual “current and former American officials”), claimed that members of the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” before the 2016 election.

This was false. Just as important, the FBI knew it was false.

But we, the American people, only know that now, in 2020, because Strzok’s notes were finally made public on Friday.

The Times article centrally identified former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a key adviser in communication with Kremlin spies. Strzok, however, countered that the bureau was “unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party.”

Significantly, the Times report was part of a tireless campaign of government leaks, mostly from current and former intelligence operatives (undoubtedly from officials who either worked in agencies still teeming with Obama holdovers or left government after serving the Obama administration).

The story was published just after the firing of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser. As part of the Trump transition, Flynn had engaged in perfectly appropriate contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, but had been publicly portrayed as if he were a clandestine agent working for Moscow against the country he’d bled for as a decorated US Army commander.

The narrative of “Trump collusion with Russia” was pure fiction. The public officials who peddled it to a voracious anti-Trump press had to know it was bunk. Yet they fed the beast anyway, regardless of the cloud this created, regardless of how much it harmed the administration’s capacity to govern.