RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-doesnt-need-a-new-revolution-11593201840?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Outrage is the natural response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. Yet outrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand. An act of police brutality became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood. Protests spilled over into violence and looting. Stores were destroyed; policemen and civilians injured and killed. The truism “black lives matter” was joined by a senseless slogan: “Defund the police.”

Democratic politicians—and some Republicans—hastened to appease the protesters. The mayors of Los Angeles and New York pledged to cut their cities’ police budgets. The Minneapolis City Council said it intended to disband the police department. The speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats donned scarves made of Ghanaian Kente cloth and kneeled in the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney joined a march.

Corporate executives scrambled to identify their brands with the protests. By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-covid-chutzpah-11593212522?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Texas and Florida put their economic reopenings on pause Friday amid new coronavirus flare-ups, and you can almost feel the Schadenfreude rising from newsrooms and Democratic offices. Serves those Republican-run states right for opening so quickly!

The truth is that those states began reopening several weeks ago, and not all states that have reopened have had major outbreaks. The causes of the flare-ups are varied. Some may spread among young people ignoring social-distancing advice. Border counties in Texas have been especially hard hit, perhaps from cross-border migration from hard-hit Mexico. Houston had 60,000 people at the George Floyd funeral and demonstration three weeks ago, and masks weren’t ubiquitous.

The outbreaks are worrying, but the reopening was always going to require trial and error. Opening up bars to regular business may have been a mistake, and now Florida and Texas are shutting them down or limiting the number of patrons. The flare-ups should cause people to be more cautious, but they don’t justify the economic and public-health damage of strict new state-wide lockdowns.

As for chutzpah, the prize goes to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who reveled in the misery of others on Friday: “Oh, I say to them all, look at the numbers. You played politics with this virus and you lost. You told the people of your state and you told the people of this country, White House, ‘Don’t worry about it. Just open up, go about your business, this is all Democratic hyperbole.’ Oh, really? Now you see 27 states with the numbers going up. You see the death projections going up.”

https://www.dailysquib.co.uk/world/37607-u-s-criminals-solidly-endorse-defunding-police.html

A consortium of criminals have solidly endorsed the defunding of police forces of America, so that their criminal activities can be completed without any resistance or prosecution.

Speaking at the consortium, master safe breaker, Ernie Monkhouse, 43, from Chicago extolled the benefits of the police defunding:

“Usually breaking into a bank’s vault takes 15 minutes minimum before the pigs arrive. Now we can take our time and the Democrats say they will send a social worker and a mental health worker to talk us down. We either shoot them in the fuckin’ head, or tie ’em up in the vault, take the millions and walk out, free as birds!”

Attendees at the consortium included many organised crime syndicates who welcomed the defunding police forces.

“I know I’d rather have a cop with no gun coming at me on a beat up bicycle after our crew brutally robs a cash transit van than a shitload of armed cops in cars. Thank you Democrats, you certainly have our vote,” one gang member quipped.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/25/lincolns-new-assassins/

The fact that we have produced senseless mobs willing to tear down our monuments testifies to the fact that we, the living, need to do more to honor our nation’s living spirit, not merely take selfies before dead bronze.

Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.

According to noted Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight’s account of the statue’s creation, the sculptor, Thomas Ball, had altered his conception from a “‘kneeling slave . . . represented as perfectly passive’ (freedom given), to an ‘emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance’ (freedom seized), . . . the monument as an ‘ideal group . . . [was] converted into the literal truth of history.’” 

In other words, the Commission charged with coming up with an appropriate memorial and raising funds from freed slaves—yes, the mob would be desecrating the memories, labor, and donations of enslaved Americans—saw the potential problems in the design and persuaded the sculptor to alter the statue.

The model for the slave, Archer Alexander, was the last slave captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/philosophy-behind-our-culture-wars-and-advancing-jason-d-hill/

In my last article, “The Advancing Nihilism and the Rot of Post-Modernism in the West,” I submitted that the culture wars taking place in the streets and universities across the United States and parts of Europe were symptoms of a larger moral pandemic whose philosophic roots both spawned and legitimized anarchical impulses run amok. I pointed out that moral relativism advances the idea that there are no objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. Its ruling principle is subjectivism. What one feels is the truth constitutes the truth. Logic and reason, according to the more radical school of subjectivism, is the creation of racist and imperialist white constructs. But if nihilism is the logical concomitant of relativism, one must now ask: what is the school and the philosophical foundation of relativism? What first foundational principles underscore the relativism that gives rise to the nihilism in the streets and in our educational systems?

That school of thought is postmodernism. If you want to see the connection between calls for a decolonized syllabus and indiscriminate vandalism of all statues because they are simply representations of the past and representative of men of a racial orientation; if you want to see metaphysical rage directed aimlessly at the universe, anger directed at everyone but no one in particular, look no further than the school of postmodernism–a vicious anti-reason and, therefore, anti-life phenomenon that robs human beings of a particular method of cognition. It deprives them of integrating fundamental principles in order to offer clear and lucid thinking that leads to intelligible and reasonable actions. It cuts away at the idea of an objective reality and replaces it with an unbridled and amorphous, necrotic lump of feelings that are treated as tools of cognition. But these feelings are only the fears, prejudices and projections of chronically anxious people for whom truth is a death knell, as it emancipates them from their self-curated silos and forces them into a universe that cares only about facts, not feelings or wishful thinking.

Hence, hacking mindlessly at statues, “decolonizing syllabi,” and ridding educational courses of canonical dead white educators cannot magically bring about a new world order. And the perpetrators know it. So they resort to wanton destruction and nihilism. Ideas have consequences; and further, all actions, even nihilistic ones, are antecedently traceable back to some philosophical set of principles. Postmodern nihilism is the ruling school of thought guiding human actions today and destroying our civilization. Its ruling principles deserve to be elucidated and delineated clearly.