RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/08/be-courageous-stand-firm-america-we-do-not-kneel/

Americans didn’t kneel to British tyranny, Nazi fascism, or Soviet communism. We won’t kneel for a collective guilt movement that’s gone off the rails.

Those who live in the far north in author George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels live by one principle: “We do not kneel.” They call themselves the “Free Folk.”

That used to be a label that was proudly worn by all Americans. But a still-too-unquestioned movement pushing guilt-by-associated-skin-tone has begun to undo one of this nation’s bedrock ideals.

The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd’s death—and embraced by those guilted into submission—creates a two-tiered social stratification of “kneelers” and “those who refuse to bend the knee” that’s wholly un-American.

Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in “critical race theory” and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others. Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/11/yes-lets-defund-the-police-at-the-epa/

Democrats have met the enemy, and it is the police. Well, not all police. They love the heavily armed federal police at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Just days after George Floyd died in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, Democrats managed to compile a sweeping police reform bill that would, among other things, limit “qualified immunity” of police officers, lower the limits on what constitutes excessive force, create a national registry of police misconduct, bar the use of “no-knock” arrest warrants, and limit the transfer of military equipment to police departments.

Meanwhile, Democrats around the country have been talking about defunding the police, with some proposing to shift resources from law enforcement to social services.

But none has proposed imposing similar restrictions on federal officers. And no Democrat is talking about defunding them.

Even some on the left have noticed this disparity. The leftist Slate.com published an article last week complaining that “while Democrats seek to rein in local law enforcement, they have given the most powerful and least accountable police force in the country a free pass.”

The writer was referring to Customs and Border Patrol agents, another bête noir of the left. But the CBP is often dealing with violent lawbreakers.

What’s the excuse for federal agencies such as the EPA, Food and Drug Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Education, and National Institute of Standards and Technology to be purchasing military-grade equipment?

A 2016 study by Open the Books found that from 2006 to 2014, more than 60 federal agencies spent a total of $1.5 billion on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. The EPA alone spent more than $3 million on such weaponry.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/culture-and-heritage-matter-too/

EXCERPTS

The notion that cultural heritage should be protected during an armed conflict ought not be terribly controversial; the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, have enshrined the principle that historical monuments, educational institutions, and institutions of religious, not-for-profit, artistic, or scientific significance should be spared by combatants for the sake of the survival of our collective patrimony. This was understood even in late antiquity, as when the Byzantine general Belisarius, during the 549-550 siege of Rome, advised his adversary, Totilo the Ostrogoth, that:

Her monuments belong to posterity, and an outrage committed upon them will rightly be regarded as a great injustice to all future generations as well as to the memory of those who created them. Therefore consider well. Should you be victorious in this war, Rome destroyed will be your own loss, preserved it will be your fairest possession. Should it be your fortune to be defeated, the conqueror will owe you gratitude if you spare Rome, whereas if you demolish it, there will be no reason for clemency, while the act itself will have brought you no profit. And remember that your reputation in the eyes of the world is at stake.

…..the property damage and cultural vandalism carried out in recent weeks — which has even been visited on monuments to figures like Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Robert Gould Shaw — has been perpetrated by those deemed sympathetic by the media. Thus to express even the slightest qualms about the destruction of property, livelihoods, and heritage is treated as some sort of dog-whistle denial of human or civil rights. Meanwhile “bullets are whistling through the galleries” once again, but this time it is not just Dadaists on the societal fringe who are cheering it on. I am not entirely sure how a humane culture can persist on such terms, and I have absolutely no idea how cultural institutions can carry out their traditional missions as repositories of our collective heritage in such an environment, as calls to “decolonize” the collections, stacks, and curricula of museums, libraries, and universities mount, and as even the most anodyne monuments are systematically toppled or defaced.”