RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/to-fully-comprehend-trump-an-insight-into-the-jargon-of-nycs-inner-boroughs/

DPS NOTE: “Yes, he doesn’t speak the way Ivy league college graduates do. Yes, he is closer to Groucho Marx than he is to Cornell West. But if you give it a try and listen to what he means as opposed to how he expresses it, I think you’ll have a better grasp of why so many Americans like him. You can remain adamantly opposed to his political agenda but maybe you can give yourself a break and save some of your apparent need to hate for people who deserve it – like the Mullahs in Iran, or Chairman Xi in China, or Tsar Putin in Russia, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea. ”

For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews. The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented hereand here and here and here and here. Although much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues, an underestimated factor is that community’s natural acquaintance with Borscht Belt humor. Those who “get” that humor know precisely how to understand Trump, what to take seriously, what to brush off, and what deeper messages to take away from his speeches and tweets. Those who do not get the style and nuance end up completely misunderstanding him and then attacking him for communicating thoughts he never contemplated.

As is manifest from Trump’s yuuuuge crowds from Alabama to Iowa to everywhere else he goes, one does not have to be from 1950s Borscht Belt New York or of Orthodox Jewish orientation to “get” him. All it takes is an open mind and a sense of humor from a time in the not-so-distant past when people could joke about things and could say ridiculous and absurd things without being taken so literally and without being hunted down by the PC police.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/for_ilhan_omar_the_best_defense_is_always____antisemitism.html

On Thursday, Britain’s Daily Mail ran a story that America’s media has refused to cover: the strong evidence that Ilhan Omar married her own brother, Ahmed Elmi, in order to commit immigration and student loan fraud. Omar’s first response was precisely what everyone expected: She claimed anti-Muslim hate speech.

By Friday, though, Omar had escalated her rhetoric, not directly but by proxy. She retweeted a post from Humans 4 Human Rights asserting that any challenge to Omar is a Zionist conspiracy.

Reading through the site, it’s apparent that the people behind it are from the Jeremy Corbyn left. It calls Boris Johnson a “rich men’s lapdog,” and inveigles against the “BLATANT UGLY FACTS of the SLEAZY SCHEMING foundation & agenda of #BREXIT, pushed & supported by the WHITE PRIVILEGED CORPORATE BANKSTERHOOD, #UK’s elite #RulingClass, whose only aim is to get richer and damn the ordinary poor f***ks, the #BRITISH #PEOPLE.” It warns that, in a post-Brexit UK, “children . . . the sick, vulnerable and homeless” won’t survive.

The site doesn’t like Trump, calling his administration a “kakistocracy” (rule by bad people), and it hates and fears Jews. On the subject of a “Free Palestine,” it states that “‘Antisemitism’ is the weapon of choice for Psychological Warfare to silence all of us who demand a #FreePalestine!” The one thing it really loves is Ilhan Omar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/a_whiny_meghan_markle_retreats_when_the_queen_bans_her_use_of_the_royal_name.html

On Tuesday, news broke that the Queen had banned Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from marketing the “Sussex Royal” brand. Friday morning, another story broke, saying that Meghan was whining about this because she and Harry had already invested money in selling themselves. Also on Friday, the Queen won and Meghan backed down.

Queen Elizabeth comes from a generation that holds that you can’t eat your cake and have it. In other words, when you make choices, you have to take both the benefit and the burden of that choice.

Meghan Markle, on the other hand, is a child of the Veruca Salt generation. For those who are not fans of the classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie, Veruca is the spoiled brat who sings “I Want It Now.” Although Veruca gets her comeuppance, too many people have bought into the Veruca Salt theory that the world is hers for the taking:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hollywood-legend-talks-politics-11582311359?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Many years ago,” Clint Eastwood says—drawing close to me as if to share a secret—“I was in Las Vegas.” The Hollywood actor and director was staying at a hotel owned by Steve Wynn, the casino billionaire. “Steve called me up in the room and said, ‘Do you want to go play golf? We’re going out with Trump.’ I said, ‘Who?’ and Steve said, ‘Trump. You know Trump?’ ”

So Messrs. Eastwood and Wynn ventured out for a morning on the course with Donald Trump. “It was funny,” Mr. Eastwood says, “because every time I was together with Steve”—with the future president out of earshot—“he would say, ‘You know, Trump is doing those damn casinos. He’s going to lose his ass.’ ” And when Mr. Wynn couldn’t hear, “Trump would say, ‘You know, Steve is going to do this big hotel. He’s going to land right on his ass. There are too many hotels now.’ ”

Back and forth the dissing went for hours, Mr. Eastwood recalls: “Together, they were great friends, but separately they were giving each other a hard time. I don’t know how much tongue-in-cheek was in all of that, but it was very amusing for me, the lone guy.”

Mr. Eastwood relates this story over a frugal lunch, in response to my asking for his thoughts on Mr. Trump. We’re seated outdoors at the Tehama Golf Club, which he owns, with views of Carmel Valley and the Monterey Peninsula, among the most expensive slivers of real estate in America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/socialism-makes-people-do-strange-things-bruce-thornton/

Apart from the bizarrerie of Trumpophobia, the wide-spread Democrat  attraction to socialism is the strangest political phenomenon of postwar America. In 2016, the ascent of Bernie Sanders, the inconsequential senator from Vermont, bespoke a more limited audience comprising mainly millennials for whom politics is a marker of personal identity. Now we’re seeing a slate of primary candidates who all embrace socialist policies far to the left of Barack Obama’s public persona. What does this phenomenon portend for November and beyond?

Certainly the mainstream Democrats who rigged the 2016 primary on behalf of Hillary Clinton are nervous. Old Clinton wrangler James Carville is alarmed: He called Sanders’ supporters a “cult,” and prophesied that if Sanders runs against Trump, it would bring on “the end of days.” Sanders responded by calling Carville a “political hack,” a moniker Carville embraced as superior to being a political amateur and a “communist.”

For other Democrats, Sanders vs. Trump would reprise storied Democrat wipeouts like 1972 and 1980. Nor do polls suggest that socialism’s appeal has increased: 53% of those recently polled by Gallup said they would not support a “generally well-qualified socialist” for president, whereas 90% would support a black, Catholic, Hispanic, female, or Jewish one. The U.S.’s historical, and exceptional, resistance to socialism still seems to hold.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

It is a given that war produces physical and psychological horrors that statistics do not describe, movies cannot portray, and fiction cannot illustrate. It is a maxim that the best way to avoid war is to be so strong and so vigilant that no rational nation or group will attack. Even then, there will always be attempts, for reason is too often absent and evil is always with us. 

The next major attack on the United States is less likely to come from missiles or suicide-intentioned terrorists, and more likely to emanate from disruption or corruption of technology systems that govern our lives. Any enemy state or terrorist organization could be the culprit, but high on the list of bad actors are the Chinese. As the internet and “smart” devices become more pervasive in our lives, our dependency grows. We have become more vulnerable, as our negligence has allowed China to take the lead in the development of next generation networks known as 5G and the superfast networks. These technologies will facilitate communications; financial institutions; transportation systems, including rail, autonomous vehicles and highways; energy and utilities. “For the first time in our history,” Attorney General William Barr was blunt in his keynote address to the Department of Justice’s China Initiative Conference on February 6, “the United States is not leading the next technology era.”

It is 5G that is of concern. David Goldman, an American economist who as “Spengler” writes in the Asia Times, recently wrote in PJ Media: “We sat on our hands while China’s Huawei took the lead in the game-changing technology that will usher in what the Chinese call the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Everybody has heard of 5G, but few appreciate its ramifications. Reading the Attorney General’s speech[1] woke me like a rooster crowing at `dawn. Barr is not new to this subject. He focused on China studies at Columbia University in the early 1970s and then spent fifteen years at GTE and its successor firm Verizon, so knows something of the communication industry. He quoted one of his classmates: “Russia wants to conquer the world. We can deal with that. China wants to own the world. That is going to be more challenging…”

amgreatness.com/2020/02/19/polarization-narrative-is-a-triumph-for-leftism/

The sharp divide in our politics is not an unfortunate consequence of rising extremism or some other trans-ideological cause. It is exactly what the American Left has wanted all along.

When commentators regret the ferocious polarization in the United States following the election of President Donald Trump, conservatives must be wary. Polarization as a term to describe the political scene has strategic value for liberals. In calling what has happened to our country a problem of a disappearing middle, liberals obscure actions of the Left that have produced the antagonisms of the present. Here’s how it works.

We begin with a longstanding norm, one embraced more or less by everyone. At some point, a vanguard of progressives comes along to challenge, decry, and subvert the norm. At first, the populace rejects the critics and the middle is secure (for instance, the way the Beat Generation was confined in the 1950s to small social enclaves).

But the critics don’t give up. They press the point in movies, the media, classrooms, and courtrooms, turning those spaces into forums of dissent.

They begin, too, with a benign premise: let’s not take our values for granted, let’s examine our assumptions, consider alternative viewpoints. We are a relatively open society, we have a natural American penchant for innovation, and so the consideration moves forward.

As the genuinely radical nature of progressive critics emerges, conservatives, traditionalists, and some moderate liberals step up and cry, “Whoa!” It’s not that they are trying to shut the other side up or end the debate. Instead, they have examined the progressive line of thinking and judged it wrong. The goal, then, is to oppose any action taken on the basis of the critique. Keep on talking, they say, but we don’t want to change our laws, our education, our norms, our country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/democratic-socialist-government-it-even-legal-jason-d-hill/

When I first applied for US citizenship and subsequently became a United States citizen, there was a question on the qualifying exam that asked if I had ever been a member of the communist party or had ever advanced the ideas of communism. As a committed conservative Democrat at the time (I am now a committed conservative independent) the question caused me no turmoil. I answered: NO to both. It was a disqualifying question. It seemed uncontroversial to me. Communism and the ideals of the American commitment to freedom, liberty, property rights, individualism and free market capitalism were philosophical and political antipodes. If I had answered yes to those questions, I would properly have been deemed an enemy of the state and regarded as unqualified to become a naturalized American citizen, not on political grounds — but, fundamentally, on moral ones.

The right to regard oneself as an end in oneself, the right to carve out a conception of the good life for oneself independent of government interference, the right to voluntarily deal with others (or not) by means of one’s own independent judgment and, further, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of personal happiness — are indelibly constitutive features of our American system of government and socio-political ways of life.

The right to also create unlimited wealth that is a material application of a value produced by one’s mind — and tangibly ratified and endorsed by consumer support — is protected by the traditional American system. When I produce something tangible and I manifest it in the world, and it is rewarded by others, I know that this is a function of the application of my values and rational faculty to the problems of human survival that others have rewarded me for.

So when the Democratic Socialist Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, says we have enough billionaires, I know she is placing a moratorium on the precondition for wealth creation: the stupendous creativity of the human mind, and, therefore, a strike against the mind and the human brain.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-swedish-author-johan-norberg-on-the-devastating-impact-of-socialism-and-what-it-could-cost-the-u-s?itm_source=parsely-api?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=021520-news&utm_campaign=position3

Frank Camp February 14th, 2020
With the success of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has come the rise in notoriety and popularity of so-called Democratic socialism in the United States.

According to a 2019 Gallup survey, 43% of Americans said that “some form of socialism [would] be a good thing” for the United States. Regardless of whether or not Americans fully understand what “socialism” means, they appear to support it in some way nonetheless.

Because of this development, I thought it would be vital to speak with Swedish author Johan Norberg, an historian of ideas and CATO Institute fellow, who has written such books as “In Defense of Global Capitalism” and “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” among others.

His documentary film, “Sweden, Lessons for America?” hit the airwaves in 2018, and can be rented or purchased on Amazon and iTunes, and is available for free on YouTube.

In part one of this two-part interview, Norberg discusses socialism as a philosophy, the rise and fall of Sweden due to its experimentation with socialist ideas, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders and what that means for the United States, and how even voluntary “libertarian” experiments in socialism have failed.

DW: There are a lot of people who cite the so-called “Nordic model” when advocating for socialism or “democratic socialism.” Is Sweden a socialist nation? And if it’s not, why do people seem to think it is?

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“You’re a racist!” The words stung. At first, I was upset and mystified. The word racist is defined by Webster as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human behavior and the racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” I could not understand the vitriol that prompted the accusation. I do not (and did not) believe I am racist, nor do I think I am misogynistic, anti-Semitic or xenophobic. While this incident occurred three years ago, I had not belittled Blacks by urging them to be dependent on an all-caring government. I have never implied they could not make it on their own; in fact, I have suggested they could and would – that aspiration was half the battle. I have never denied Asian-Americans admission to America’s most prestigious universities, simply because they were Asians, nor have I ever supported Boycott and Divest Sanctions (BADS) against Israel, just because the Jewish people wish to defend a homeland that dates back 2000 years And I never persuaded a young intern to perform oral sex in my office.

I am certainly no paragon of virtue. But all I had done was to write words in support of Mr. Trump’s attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to “drain the swamp,” a quagmire of corrupt politicians, crony capitalists and bureaucratic administrators who feed off the public teat. I had had the temerity to defy teachers’ unions, when writing in support of school choice for inner-city children. I had provoked the anger of the “woke” by supporting the “stop, question and frisk” policy in cities where crime is a constant menace for minorities.