RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/california-dems-trash-americas-gay-hero/

“As Pride month nears an end,” Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, “Republican lawmakers announced they were honoring Ambassador Grenell, the first openly gay presidential cabinet member, for his accomplishments and stellar career in service to the country.”

As Bruce Bawer noted in 2020, Grenell is “America’s gay hero,” with distinguished service as US ambassador to Germany and director of national intelligence. It was acting DNI Grenell who “declassified the list of Obama Administration officials who, in the interval between the 2016 election and the Trump inaugural, requested the ‘unmasking’ of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, so they could listen in on his phone calls.” That service cut no slack with California Democrats.

Cheers rang out in the California Senate, Grimes explains,  “until five Senators walked out during Republican Senator Brian Jones’ introduction of Grenell.” The walkout followed a “nasty Tweet” on June 26 from San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener:

“This is their way of celebrating Pride, by bringing in a guy who is truly a self-hating gay man, who takes tons of anti-LGBTQ positions  There are plenty of gay Republicans who don’t do the unhinged things that [Grenell] does. I’m not lumping all gay Republicans together – he is a particularly vile person.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/in_an_american_first_cocaine_was_found_in_the_white_house.html

At first, it was scary: A bag of white powder was found in the White House’s West Wing, causing the Secret Service to do a partial evacuation. However, once it became known that the white powder in the White House was cocaine, that opened the way to some interesting questions. Is there a Biden staffer (or more than one) who uses cocaine while working for a person who is theoretically the most powerful man in the world? Or has Hunter Biden, an acknowledged serious drug addict who’s allegedly “clean” and who’s been hanging around the White House lately, relapsed?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/patriotism-under-siege/

This year’s Fourth of July arrives at a time of doubt and even disdain for our nation’s birth and foundational principles. For most of our history this day has celebrated the bold, epochal Declaration of Independence that staked a claim to self-government and freedom from the world’s most powerful empire. The nation that followed after eight years of war went on to become, and still is, the freest, most prosperous, and, for all its all-too-human betrayals of those principles, the most generous great power in all of history.

The heart of our affection does not come from blood and soil, but from truly revolutionary ideals expressed in the Declaration’s preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The new nation was created to “secure these rights,” not to bestow or create them, and it “derives [its] just powers from the consent of the governed.”­­

Such obvious truths, however, have been for decades contested by some of our country’s most privileged beneficiaries, and the patriotism that expresses our country’s goodness disparaged and mocked. In its place a fashionable oikophobia­­––the hatred of one’s country, principles, virtues, history, and the fellow citizens who still believe in our civic ideals and their goodness––preens morally and embraces the impossible utopias that such oikophobes promote.

Patriotism, the beating heart of our “unum” that binds the “pluribus,” is besieged at a time when we face dangerous developments like enormous debt, open borders, and assaults on our Constitutional order and Bill of Rights at home, and abroad totalitarian rivals “filled with passionate intensity” to supplant our global power, and diminish our freedom.

http://www.swtotd.bllogspot.com

Of all the canards foisted on the American public, one of the lamest is the assertion that outcomes should be equal. Equality of outcomes (something that can never be) should not be confused with the fact that we are all, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg in 1863, created equal (something that we are) – equal in the eyes of God and equal under the laws of the United States, or at least we all have been since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Equality of outcomes should also not be confused with the idea that we should all have equal opportunities to succeed in our chosen fields, something we do not have. There are other false tales told the American public: that the Earth will self-destruct if we do not reduce fossil fuel consumption, or the assertion that one’s sex is a social construct, that fairness requires the forgiveness of student loans, and the demeaning implication that affirmative action is necessary for Blacks to achieve parity with whites.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in August 1945, while the Soviet Union was still a World War II ally. It was written as an allegory on how the inequalities of Tsarist Russia became replicated in the inequalities of Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union. In the 1930s and through the early 1950s, many intelligent people responded to the siren call of the “Communist utopian state.” However, the promise of state-directed equal outcomes was a lie. In fact, wealth inequality worsened. In 1900, Russian per capita GDP was roughly 30% of the United States’. Under Putin’s Russia, a hundred and twenty years later, Russian per capita GDP had shrunk to about 17% of that in the U.S. In spite of that discrepancy (or perhaps because of it), Putin is considered to be the richest world leader, with a net worth of $200 billion

Here at home, the promise of equal outcomes is, of course, a political ruse, meant to detract from promises unfulfilled. Merit has been subsumed by calls for diversity. While we are all, as the Declaration of Independence states, endowed by our Creator “with certain unalienable rights,” people have never been equal; they are not now, and they never will be. We are unique individuals. Some are tall, others short. Some are artistic, others athletic, and still others musical. Some have a talent for liberal arts; others for mathematics. Some are intellectually brilliant; others must study to keep up. Some are born wealthy; others are born poor. Some are born to two-parent households, others to single mothers. Some are born in small towns, while others are born in cities or suburbs. A few have the benefit of private schools; most rely on public schools. A few are born with physical, mental, or emotional challenges; others live charmed lives. Some are aspirant, others content to be followers. Yet, we are equal under the law. As citizens, we have equal rights to vote. As humans, we should expect to be treated with equal measures of respect and dignity.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-battle-for-cultural-survival

Anyone with even a glancing exposure to the media over the past several years knows that conservatives are waging a “culture war.” Republicans have been advocating and all too often implementing hurtful changes to settled social arrangements, proclaim the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets on a near-daily basis. This culture war arises primarily out of “hate and fear,” according to President Joe Biden, but pecuniary motives play a role as well, as GOP operatives try to stir up the base and shake it down for donations.

Coverage of this alleged culture war demonstrates the Left’s most important power: the ability to set the default. The Left engineers disruption after disruption to longstanding social practices, each more sweeping than the last. And as soon as those changes are in place, they become the norm, treated as having existed from time immemorial. Questioning that new default is painted as churlish and radical. The Left never has to meet a burden of proof to implement its changes; the burden falls exclusively on conservatives seeking to restore a once-uncontroversial tradition. Though conservatives are portrayed as the aggressors, in reality they are always on the defensive, fighting a rearguard action.

Default-setting shows up across the cultural landscape, whether regarding the requirement that college faculty swear fealty to racial preferences (a.k.a. “diversity”) as a condition of employment, or regarding the introduction of politicized concepts such as “intersectionality” and white privilege into the K-12 curriculum. Its most stunning instantiation, however, is transgender ideology.

The trans revolution has unfolded in a micro percentage of a nanosecond in the context of millions of years of human development. It has introduced ideas that would have been incomprehensible to every previous generation of humanity, whether they found themselves on the African, Asian, American, or European continents. As recently as the 1980s, “trans issues” had not surfaced even among gender theorists themselves, according to the field’s progenitor, Judith Butler.

But now that academic gender theorists have managed to infiltrate their startling creed into virtually every mainstream American institution, contradicting millennia of human experience and centuries of scientific confirmation of that experience, any dissent from the new default is portrayed as a war against the natural order of things, branding the dissenters as hateful and even homicidal.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/04/yes_virginia_america_really_is_a_good_country_

Every year at Christmastime, news sites reprint the touching letter from a little girl, Virginia O’Hanlon, asking about Santa Claus and the columnist’s reassuring, fatherly response. He doesn’t smack her with the hard fact that Santa is a fictional creation. He points toward a deeper truth about our shared celebrations and the web of fond memories that bind together generations of children, parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents.

As we celebrate this Independence Day, we desperately need to remember our own shared beliefs and ideals in hopes they will bind together our divided nation. Our shared ideals and common identity as Americans should bind us. Today, alas, they are too frayed to do the job. Some think it is a fraud even to stress those commonalities.

It is not. Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.”