RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/paul-johnsons-america/

“What is America? It is not a race but a cohesion of all the races of the world. It will soon be a nation of 300 million, 10 per cent of whom were not even born there. Its creation from Europe, Africa and Asia is a continuing process, as countless immigrants arrive each year and are quietly absorbed and prosper. Moreover, these citizens, whose parents, grandparents or ancestors came from all over the world, are given the chance to participate in democracy at all levels, which exists nowhere else on earth. More than 600,000 offices in the US are elected. The entire public ethos of America is fashioned to finding out what the voters want and constructing policy on their wishes. America is successful precisely because it is a working multiracial democracy. To be anti-American, therefore, is to be anti-humanity. For no other country represents so clearly the current wishes and long-term aspirations of the human race.”

That is from “To hate America is to hate humanity,” an April 6, 2002 Spectator piece by historian Paul Johnson, who recently passed away at the age of 94. Five years earlier, Johnson published A History of the American People, a magisterial account that speaks to conditions at the time of the great author’s passing.

It’s hard to find any author, left or right, who devotes more attention to the issue of slavery, at the time of the American founding and leading up to the Civil War. In an 1855 election in Kansas, Johnson writes:

“Missourians crossed the border in thousands and swamped the polls. At all events the slavers swept the polls, expelled from the legislature the few anti-slavers who were elected, adopted a drastic slave-code, and made it a capital offense to help a slave escape or aid a fugitive. They even made orally questioning the legality of slavery a felony.” (emphasis added)

The demand for thought control and censorship derives from the people who kept human beings in subjugation and opposed all efforts to free them. This early version of the totalitarian mentality finds a counterpart in America under the Biden Junta.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/01/22/it-looks-like-bidens-classified-documents-scandal-is-about-to-explode-n1663975

Joe Biden takes classified documents very seriously, so he says, but even after the search for classified documents has allegedly ended a couple of times now, it’s not yet over.

In the wake of more documents being discovered at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., the Department of Justice is now considering expanding its search for classified documents Biden may have absconded with, according to a report from CBS News.

“Justice Department officials are also considering the possibility of conducting other consensual searches at locations linked to Mr. Biden, said the source familiar with the investigation,” the report says.

So far, somewhere between 25 and 30 classified documents, some of which are marked top secret, have been discovered in Biden’s possession—either at his home in Wilmington or at his private office at the Penn Biden Center.

The decision to search more places for documents is a troubling development for Joe Biden and the White House team, who have clearly been caught off-guard by a scandal they had hoped to keep under wraps before it was leaked to the media a couple of weeks ago.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/23/joe-bidens-souvenirs/

The Clinton’s were accused of stealing silverware on their way out, but that’s minor league compared to what Joe Biden might have done.

President Joe Biden of course adopted a sanctimonious stance when it was reported that classified documents were found at Donald Trump’s Florida estate. “Totally irresponsible,” said the man who has been keeping classified documents going back to his years in the Senate.

As infuriating as his comment was, Biden might be guilty of more than hypocrisy.

Biden has left a growing trail of classified documents behind him, including papers from his Senate “service” as well as his terms as vice president. They’ve been turned up at Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington – the “think tank” where Biden kept an office and which helped the University of Pennsylvania rake in ​​$30 million from Chinese interests – and the president’s Delaware residence. The more Justice Department agents look, the more they find. Despite his Gertrude Stein protest, there is a there there.

So, is Biden a kleptomaniac (the American people deserve to know if their president is a crook)? Were the documents misplaced by careless staffers? If so, why didn’t Biden choose more trustworthy aides, administration hands who knew which documents were hot and needed to be stored in a secure space?

Or, is it possible that Biden been covering the tracks of his decades of corruption?

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/21/liberty-justice-and-peace-on-earth/

Years ago, while demonstrating to support or oppose some very important cause I’ve long since forgotten, I committed an unpardonable sin. I accidentally paid attention to what we were chanting. 

“No Justice, No Peace!” we repeated, waving signs and banners confirming that we were adamant.

It felt good. Why should the unjust enjoy a moment’s peace? Why shouldn’t they suffer as incessantly as their victims? Could anyone stand against us? Would those we were protesting really say: “Yes, yes. We’ve done unspeakable things to benefit ourselves at the expense of others. But we’ve already won. Now run along home and let us enjoy our illicit victories?” 

Of course not. The righteousness of our position was unassailable. How could we lose?

We couldn’t. Until, that is, I took that moment to think. In that fleeting moment, I realized that our glorious chant had things exactly backward. In the pantheon of virtues, there may be no greater enemies than justice and peace.

Justice requires full compensation for all prior misdeeds. Justice makes victims whole. Justice assigns perpetrators penalties sufficient to ensure that none would even consider imitating their actions. Justice cannot prevail until every grievance has been addressed, adjudicated, and repaired. Justice looks backward to fix the past. 

Peace looks forward. Peace is always about hope for the future. There is a reason the phrase “you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends” has arisen everywhere, from Gaza to “Game of Thrones.” For war to give way to peace, all parties must relinquish past grievances. 

Peace requires accepting that the past cannot be fixed. Peace elevates future potential gains above justice for past acts. 

“No justice, no peace” has it all wrong. The choices are either “war until justice” or peace that recognizes some injustices cannot be fixed. 

That’s a bitter pill because justice and peace are both virtues. Every decent person, society, and moral code should value both. Yet no society can have both. Tradeoffs are always necessary—and many will always find such tradeoffs unacceptable.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/21/too-much-to-hope/

It’s time to quote André Gide again: “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” “All things are said already, but since no one is listening, it is always necessary to start again.” 

You already know everything I am going to talk about today: our two-tier, double-standard society, exemplified by the very different ways Donald Trump and Joe Biden are treated by the media and our Staatspolizei (a.k.a. the FBI) for “mishandling” and/or possessing classified documents; the minatory surrealism of Davos, where our would-be masters congregate to impress themselves and consort with prostitutes; the on-going January 6 “insurrection” fiasco which continues to sweep up and ruin the lives of ordinary Americans.

Regular readers know I was not optimistic about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his little band of Republicans who now run the House. How often have we had Republicans take office promising to cut spending, limit government overreach, and root out corruption and self-dealing, only to deliver . . . why, the same old thing! More spending, more government in your life, more, if sometimes newly diverted, corruption. It’s what politicians do. 

All that is inscribed in the DNA of those who seek, and therefore usually do not deserve, political power. It’s why James Madison and other founders went to such lengths to limit the size and the power of government. They understood that men are not “angels,” as Madison wrote, and therefore need to be constrained, as does government. It is also why politicians of both parties are happy to quote Madison just so long as his message is studiously neglected. 

Did you know that the federal debt now tops $31 trillion? You probably heard that while you were scrambling eggs ($8 a dozen where I live) on your gas stove (enjoy that while you can). Like me, you probably shrug your shoulders at such an incomprehensibly large number. As it happens, the last time the federal debt was under $1 trillion was in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was president. It’s gone up every single year since then. As the economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Can this fiscal incontinence go on forever? Why don’t the people we elect to represent our interests, you know, represent our interests? Asking for a friend.