RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bda1776.substack.com/p/victims-of-communism?utm_source=email

On a recent trip to Washington, I was able to find the time to detour by the Museum of the Victims of Communism.  It’s a new museum, it’s a small museum, but it’s a worthwhile museum.  It’s also worth a few words.

I suspect that I was among the very first visitors.  I believe it’s been open less than a month.  I booked noon tickets.  When I arrived at 11:30, the receptionist looked at me and said “you must be Bruce.”  I believe that during my hour-long self-tour, we were the only two people in the building.  So it’s fair to say that the crowds have not yet arrived.

Still, it’s an excellent exhibition at a central location—two blocks north of the White House—and it addresses a critical topic.  The stories it relates are chilling, though not as chilling as the death tolls.  The exhibits go around the world and across time, tallying the fall of European, African, Asian, and American countries to the evils of Communism.  The larger downstairs exhibit focused on the Soviet Union, its conquests, and its satellites, sets a somber stage.  An upstairs exhibit dedicated entirely to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rounds it out.

One thought struck me as I was studying the sizable portion dedicated to Stalin.  It’s a thought that’s been gelling for the past decade or so, as I’ve gotten to speak to more people familiar (sadly, many intimately so) with Eastern European Communism.  And it’s a thought I find particularly chilling.

/06/entitlement_indignity_irresponsibility_enslavement_tyranny.html

“Progressive Democrats call themselves liberals, but they are in fact the enemies of liberalism.  They reject its fundamental principles such as individual liberty, personal responsibility, the right to choose, and strict limitations on government involvement in daily life.  Today’s liberals encourage victimhood and dependence on government.  They are the antithesis of liberals — they are totalitarians.  We must reject tyranny imposed by a professional political class that promises free entitlements while providing enslavement for all.”

Progressive Democrats try to bribe the public with government handouts — entitlements — such as Obamacare (“All the care that Americans deserve”), free food (“No American should go hungry”), free education (student loan forgiveness), free housing, reparations for past sins, and income redistribution (“the rich must pay their fair share”). Washington promises to deliver all these entitlements to every American, everywhere, equitably, when needed, for free. 

Of course, federal politicians will decide what equitable means, what is fair share, how much is paid in reparations and to whom, what is taught in schools, where you live, what you eat, how much money you have, and who deserves medical care — and when, even if, you get that care.

Americans need to be very clear about what will happen if they accept entitlements. 

Entitlement refers to a right to have something or the belief that one is deserving of privileges or special treatment.  When all promised entitlements are considered together, progressives intend to create a government-controlled cradle-to-grave nanny state.  They make no mention of what Americans must give up to achieve this impossible utopia: the dignity of work, personal responsibility, and freedom. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-abortion-rioters-in-arizona-damage-state-senate-building-as-lawmakers-vote/

Police in Arizona used tear gas to disperse a crowd of rioters who gathered outside the Capitol in downtown Phoenix on Friday to protest the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Arizona state senators were in the middle of voting on a series of bills when protesters “threatened to break the AZ Senate entryway glass,” state Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican, tweeted.

Rioters damaged multiple state Senate doors and memorials in Wesley Bolin Plaza, Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesman Bart Graves told KTAR News. One person was arrested.

“While working inside we were interrupted by the sound of bangs and smell of tear gas,” Representative Sarah Liguori wrote in a tweet. “Protestors cleared from the Capitol.”

Arizona Senate Republicans called the rioting an attempted “insurrection.”

Arizona State Senator Kelly Townsend, a Republican, tweeted that lawmakers were “being held hostage inside the Senate building due to members of the public trying to breach our security.”

“We smell tear gas and the children of one of the members are in the office sobbing with fear,” she added.

Some 8,000 people gathered at the protest, which started at 7 p.m., according to KTAR News. Law enforcement declared the protest an unlawful assembly roughly two hours later, according to the report.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/roe-was-never-law/

A controversial subject that should never have been wrested from the people in the states has now been returned to them.

There is no mincing words: The Supreme Court’s historic Dobbs ruling made Friday a great day for life.

A great day for the restoration of American constitutional law, too. And a great day for democracy in our republic. It marks a high moment for the United States Supreme Court, which has been tested as never before. It stood firm and yet restrained, acknowledging that the great public-policy decisions in our society are to be made by free, self-determining people, not unelected judges.

Barack Obama, perhaps the nation’s most solipsistic politician and ideologue, took only moments after the issuance of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion to wail that the Supreme Court had relegated the most “intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues.” If you’re keeping score, yes, this would be the same Barack Obama whose signature presidential “achievement” was radically expanded government control over the health sector, leaving more and more intensely personal decisions — decisions about actual health care, as opposed to the taking of unborn life under the guise of health care — at the whim of partisan Democrats and progressive bureaucrats.

The main point here, though, is not hypocrisy. It is hard-edged politics. The former president went directly to politics because, for abortion crusaders, there has never been anything else.

In Roe, seven willful politicians in robes usurped the power of the putatively sovereign states to regulate abortion. Unless a constitutional right was at stake, the federal judiciary had no business intruding on the internal governance of the states, particularly over matters of health and safety that are the traditional domain of the states. But the Constitution does not speak to abortion.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/bons-mots-and-bad-money-inflation/

I have often been struck by the number of pithy observations — revelatory, pointed or simply true — that were not said by the person to whom they are attributed. Vladimir Lenin apparently never said (in Russian or in English) that “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Mark Twain, to whom many amusing remarks have been falsely attributed, apparently did not contend that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Edmund Burke neither said nor wrote that evil would triumph if good men did nothing.

Churchill, like Twain a magnet for orphaned mots seeking parents, did not say that “the idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusions which has ever befuddled the human mind.”

Tocqueville, yet another favored repository of crisp admonitory apothegms, did not point out that “the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

One thing to note about these pairings of putative author and scintillating observation is how plausible the linkage always is. Lenin certainly could have made that remark about grinding the bourgeoisie: he was keen on deploying any available millstones to destroy the class he abominated. Unlike Chief Justice John Marshall, who pointed out during the economic crisis of 1819 the great danger that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” Lenin thought of its destructiveness as an advantage.

As for inflation, has anyone improved upon Ronald Reagan’s warning that “inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman”?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-progressives-get-wrong-about-overturning-roe-now-its-citizens-who-will-decide/ar-AAYPQUi

With the release of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, politicians and pundits went public with a parade of horribles – from the criminalization of contraceptives to the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. In reality, the post-Roe world will look much like the Roe world for most citizens.

While this is a momentous decision, it is important to note what it does and does not do.

The decision itself was already largely known. It did not dramatically change since the leak of an earlier draft. The conservative majority held firm in declaring that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided: “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

In the end, Chief Justice John Roberts cut a bit of a lonely figure in the mix of the court on the issue. His concurrence did not seriously question the majority view that Roe was not based on a good law. However, he would have stopped short of overturning the decision outright. It is the ultimate call of an incrementalist detached from the underlying constitutional interpretation.

The court now has a solid majority of justices who are more motivated by what they view as “first principles” than pragmatic concerns. From a court that has long used nuanced (and maddeningly vague) opinions to avoid major changes in constitutional doctrine, we now have clarity on this issue. It will return to the citizens of each state to decide.

The court anticipated the response to the opinion by those who “stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil … other rights.” The opinion expressly does not address contraception, same-sex marriage or other rights. 

That claim has always been absurd but has become a talking point on the left. After the leak of the draft opinion, the New York Times opinion editors warned that some states likely would outlaw interracial marriage if Roe v. Wade is overturned: “Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t.”

It takes considerable imagination because it is utter nonsense, though it must come as something of a surprise to Justice Clarence Thomas, given his interracial marriage, or to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her own interracial family.