RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/celebrating-with-lee-edwards-as-communism-is-put-on-trial/?utm_source=

Last week’s opening of the Victims of Communism Museum resulted from a 35-year effort spearheaded by NR’s old and dear friend, Lee Edwards (fun fact: His first piece for this magazine, “The Way of All France,” was published in the February 1, 1958, issue). Yours Truly corresponded with Lee prior to the ribbon-cutting, asking a few questions, getting a few answers in return. It would be a shame to not share them, and so we do:

Jack Fowler: Why will the world be a better place for there being this museum?

Lee Edwards: Because the museum will serve as the cornerstone of our global educational campaign about the manifold victims and crimes of communism.

Fowler: The Nazis have been rightly denigrated, their leaders executed for crimes against humanity, the name made synonymous with evil — but there was no such justice for East Europe’s and Asia’s communist henchmen. They are not the stuff of vilification by Western media, by Western culture, at least in no way comparable to the Nazis. Is this a driving force in part behind the creation of the Victims of Communism Memorial and the museum, this sense of a lack of justice or righteous admission of just how dastardly communism is?

Edwards: Nazism was exposed and convicted at the Nuremburg trials. VOC intends to put communism on trial in Washington, D.C. We will feature witnesses from the nearly 40 nations that suffered under communism — some 1.5 billion still do so in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos.

Fowler: On the memorial, 100 million are recognized — are they the murdered? What is the greater number of true victims of communism?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/poll-young-democrats-are-souring-on-femini

Michelle Goldberg’s latest New York Times column notes a very interesting new poll regarding public opinion on feminism:

Recently the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tulchin Research commissioned a poll of 1,500 Americans to measure belief in various reactionary sentiments, including the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and the idea that trans people are a threat to children. Because misogyny is so ubiquitous in far-right spaces, Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the S.P.L.C., decided to add a question about feminism.

Predictably, most young Republicans agree with the statement, “Feminism has done more harm than good.” What was astonishing was how many young Democrats agreed as well. While only 4 percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. Nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed, compared with only 10 percent of those 50 and older.

Goldberg, a progressive and a feminist herself, concludes that this shift is due to the fact “that feminism has been sapped of cultural vitality”: “After four years of Donald Trump, more than two years of a pandemic, and an unending right-wing onslaught, a lot of people with feminist sympathies are numb and exhausted.” I have a slightly different explanation. Feminism today is distinct from the feminism of past generations — far more radical and less tolerant, more concerned with quashing dissent than securing rights. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sotomayor-on-thomas-the-one-justice-in-the-building-that-literally-knows-every-employees-name/?utm

For all of the acrimony around the Supreme Court these days, it is nice to hear this public tribute by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to being friends with her colleague Clarence Thomas, before an audience at the American Constitution Society that was obviously not sympathetic to Thomas:

Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories, He is the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida. He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution, and about people.

Of course, Sotomayor noted that she and Thomas have very different philosophies, but fundamentally, “we share a common understanding about people and kindness towards them.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/brooklyn-venue-cancels-planned-john-hinckley-jr-concert/

A Brooklyn venue set to host a concert by John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate former president Ronald Reagan in 1981, on Wednesday canceled the planned performance.

Hinckley was granted an unconditional release from all remaining court restrictions on June 1, and the release went into effect on Wednesday. Hinckley shot and injured Reagan and three others, including former press secretary James Brady, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and admitted to a mental hospital. In recent years Hinckley has recorded songs and uploaded them to his YouTube channel, and was planning to do what he has called a “redemption tour” this summer.

Concert space Market Hotel announced the decision to cancel a performance by Hinckley scheduled for July 8 on Instagram and other social media outlets. The concert was already sold out.

The venue said the concert was initially booked through a “third-party promoter,” and that one reason for hosting the show was to show that “mental health issues and a criminal past” can be “atoned for.”

“There was a time when a place could host a thing like this, maybe a little offensive, and the reaction would be ‘it’s just a guy playing a show, who does it hurt — it’s a free country.’ We aren’t living in that kind of free country anymore, for better or for worse,” Market Hotel said in its statement, stressing that Hinckley’s scheduled performance would not “practically” harm anyone.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.