RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/14/of-progressive-carnivores-and-cannibals/

The Obama-era Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes embraced just 11 years ago by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.

The parameters of marriage, in Obama’s words “between a man and woman,” has now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to transgendered fixations.

Obama once protested that he was no king who could open the border and grant amnesties by fiat. Yet his view of immigration has metamorphosed well beyond DACA and Dreamers into Democratic candidates going into Mexico to escort aliens unlawfully into our country, and 500 sanctuary jurisdictions in which federal immigration law is all but null and void. An American citizen convicted of using a fake Social Security Number and phony ID is a felon who is all but unemployable; an illegal alien who commits the same crimes learns quickly that these are not deportable offenses and mostly never prosecuted.

In a nanosecond, Betsy Ross’s iconic colonial flag, which once emblazoned the backdrop of the 2012 Obama inauguration ceremony, have become racist icons—or so Nike pitchman Colin Kaepernick has decreed, ordering his corporate bosses to remove them from commemorative sneakers.

Obamacare has abruptly morphed into “Medicare for All”—including illegal aliens who are to be eligible the moment they cross the border, despite never having paid a dime into the system.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/14/dont-celebrate-bastille-day/

Since I am writing on Bastille Day, I am prompted to wonder why the French—or anyone else, for that matter—celebrate this infamous date. After all, the “storming” of that royal keep in 1789 was the spark that started the conflagration of the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, in which the rule of law and the institutions of civil society survived the change of governments, the French Revolution was one of the signal bad events in world history. It consumed civil society and the centuries-old institutions of civilization. It was an unalloyed triumph of the totalitarian spirit, and in this respect it presaged and inspired that even greater assault on decency and freedom, the Bolshevik Revolution, the opening act of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The butcher’s bill for the French Revolution is many hundreds of thousands. Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of tens upon tens of millions and the universal immiseration of the people whose lives it controlled.

Yet today’s news is full of cheery stories about Bastille Day celebrations. Why?

It is generally a bootless errand, I know, to oppose myth with history. Myth, feeding a deep need, subsumes history. Still, truth demands that the effort be made.

One canard that we were all brought up on is that the Bastille was a loathsome dungeon full of innocent political prisoners. In fact, it harbored not hordes but precisely seven inmates when the mob stormed it. Contrary to what you have been told, the prisoners were detained in good conditions. At least one was attended by his own chef.  Bernard-René de Launay, the governor, was by all accounts a fair and patient man. But that did not save him from the mob’s “revolutionary justice.” They dragged him out of the fortress and stabbed him to death.

By rights, Bastille Day should be a day of national mourning or contrition. That it is not tells us a great deal—about the persistence of human credulousness, for example, and the folly of subordinating the imperfect, long-serving structures of civilization to the demands of impatient people infatuated by their own unquenchable sense of virtue. Tocqueville, in his book on the ancien régime at the eve of the revolution said that the “the contrast between benign theories and violent acts” was one of the Revolution’s “strangest characteristics.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/any_organization_that_denies_antisemitism_loses_credibility.html

American students, many of whom display a shocking degree of ignorance about the Holocaust, will not find much trustworthy and objective information about anti-Semitism from touted academic databases such as the CQ Researcher.  The alleged “in-depth” report on anti-Semitism dated May 12, 2017 is filled with statements about President Trump, white supremacy, and right-wing hostility.  Thus, the report asserts:

In the run-up to the presidential election and afterward, the United States has experienced disturbing outbreaks of anti-Semitism, including a spate of incidents on more than 100 college campuses, where white supremacists have been distributing anti-Semitic fliers and openly recruiting adherents.  Some human rights and Jewish activists say President Trump has emboldened right-wing hostility toward Jews, but others say such charges are unjustified.  Defining anti-Semitism is controversial.  Members of Congress and state legislators want to codify a definition that would include opposition to Israel’s existence.  But pro-Palestinian and civil liberties groups say that would violate free-speech rights.  A similar debate is playing out in Europe, where some countries have seen a rise in deadly attacks on Jews in recent years, often by radicalized Muslims, such as the 2015 terrorist attack on a kosher grocery in Paris.  Paradoxically, growing anti-Muslim attitudes in countries experiencing an influx of refugees have also spurred more prejudice against Jews — the target of history’s longest hatred.

At no time does the article speak of the ugliness of such campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) who deliberately incite anti-Semitic acts on universities.  This might assist a student in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism.

https://quillette.com/2019/07/11/neutralizing

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell observed that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He detailed how certain manners of diction are employed to that end—dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious and otherwise meaningless words all work to constitute a kind of inflated, euphemistic style of expression. This divests language of plain meaning in order to obscure brutal realities and to hide the “gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims.” As these habits are adopted and spread, clear thinking and good communication become more difficult and the process self-perpetuates. Stupid, ugly, and oppressive ideas actively distort language to create a semblance of reason and respectability; in turn, the corruption of language further predisposes people to uncritically accept and conform to the same sorts of orthodoxies.

In a vein similar to Orwell’s lexicology of apologetics, criminological theory may help inform an understanding of how speech is used in defense of the indefensible at another level of analysis—that of rhetorical strategies. Specifically, what follows is a look at the online discourse surrounding the recent assault of a journalist by antifascist demonstrators, as viewed through the lens of Neutralization Theory.

Neutralization

The crux of Neutralization Theory is this: acts that would violate accepted laws or norms, or otherwise contradict one’s beliefs or self-image, carry the threat of guilt and shame. That threat can be neutralized, allowing for such violations to occur, using rationalizations that deny the disparity between one’s values and actions. In a sense, these rationalizations are coping strategies for managing moral dissonance, quieting one’s conscience in the pursuit or defense of expedience.

Neutralization Theory was originally conceived as an explanation of juvenile delinquency by Gresham Sykes and David Matza. It has since been broadly expanded and applied to adult and white-collar crime, and to other acts of deviance and subcultural divergence. It has been used to examine honor crimes as well as the coping strategies of domestic violence victims, the denial of elderly abuse by both victims and abusers, the perpetration of right-wing violence and online ideological extremism, and even genocide and intergenerational war guilt.

Neutralization Theory “transcends the realm of criminology…[with] ‘universal applicability,’ as it can be applied to any situation where there are inconsistencies between one’s actions and beliefs,” whether individually or collectively. And so, while it has not yet been formally applied to the kind of context examined here (i.e., apologetic framings of leftist political street violence), the sheer breadth of the literature seems to suggest a cursory exploration in that direction may be warranted and fruitful.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22931/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-2020-democrat-party

  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com: http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The Democrat party platform for 2020 is a staggering political humanitarian hoax that disguises anti-Americanism as altruism. The Democratic National Committee presents itself as “working hard to advance issues like immigration reform, education reform, health care reform, and alternative energy.” Sounds great – all humanitarian hoaxes do. So, let’s see how this works.

Countries are defined by four basic elements and the Democrat party has taken aim at all four. We will examine these elements one at a time.

– territory

– population

– culture

– government

1. Territory

Territory refers to the demarcation of a country’s physical borders that define its earthly space and separate it from other countries, each with its own government. Without borders there is no country.

The open borders platform embraced by the Democrat party is their signature anti-American immigration reform. Open borders deliberately threaten the sovereign territorial borders of the United States by rejecting any attempts to defend the borders against the current mass invasion of illegal immigrants. While disingenuously insisting that open borders are a humanitarian issue, Democrat candidates oppose border wall funding and propose abolishing ICE so that nothing and no one can stop the flow of this massive invasion.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-ilhan-omar-overcome-her-prejudice-11562970265

Oh puleez! I appreciate Hirsi Ali’s unique biography and valor, but Ilhan Omar is programmed and won election because she represents the faith driven hatred of her constituents. Why should she alter her hatreds? Her fellow Democrats give her a pass, fearing that they would be tarred as Islamophobes….rsk

I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.

Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.

Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.

In my experience it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to unlearn hate without coming to terms with how you learned to hate. Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.

https://www.steynonline.com/9542/the-empire-wokes-back

The Empire Wokes Back by Mark Steyn

The internal contradictions of wokeness: Gender is totally fluid, and, if you’re unpersuaded that a six-foot man with a beard is a woman, you’ll lose your job. Whereas race is a social construct, but not that social. From my old friends at Slate:

“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” read one of a dozen similar tweets questioning Harris’ identity sent in the moments after she, while confronting Joe Biden’s record of opposing desegregation, recalled being bused to school as a little girl. Another read, “KAMALA HARRIS IS NOT BLACK” and featured a photo of Harris with a “Kamala Dolezal” emblazoned across her face, referencing Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claims to be “transracially” black. Yet another read, “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

Senator Harris is half-Jamaican and half-Indian (dot not Warren). If she were to prevail in next November’s election, she would be the second black president to come from entirely outside the African-American experience – after Barack Obama, who was half-Kenyan and half-white. I can sort of understand why, if I were the Reverend Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jesse Jackson, I’d be irked by what seems to be becoming a pattern.

As I wrote over a decade ago, Barack Obama was the first US president to be born a British subject since Andrew Jackson. Kamala Harris would be the second. What’s up with that? In my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn I quote another man born a British subject, General Colin Powell, from 1995, back when he was doing his to-run-or-not-to-run routine:

After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the Crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of inde- pendence, self-responsibility and self- worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years.

Like Kamala’s, General Powell’s identity was bluntly questioned: After he said his favorite composer was Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesse Jackson wondered, “Is this guy even black?”

If you’re looking for an alternative, there’s always Mayor Pete, who I suggested the other day was in a somewhat Obamaesque position – and whaddaya know, just like Barack he was born a British subject, too. Buttigieg is a Maltese surname, and Mayor Pete makes the cut by eleven-and-a-half months: He entered the world in January 1982, and the new British Nationality Act came into effect in January 1983, making British-subject status inheritable only if you’re stateless. So another couple of election cycles and a non-imperial gay or black might have a shot.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/11/jilted-again-the-nevertrump-left-alliance-crumbles/

The political misfits known as NeverTrumpers are begging for allies ahead of next year’s presidential election—and, as usual, they aren’t looking to the Right.

This collection of failed magazine editors, Iraq War propagandists, washed-up columnists, Russian collusion pimps, and losing campaign consultants have dogged Donald Trump and his supporters for three years. While some anti-Trump “conservatives” who contributed to National Review’s infamous “Against Trump” issue in early 2016 have become supporters of the president, others cannot let go—but their obstinance is less about principle and more about grift: Acting as the useful conservative idiot for the Washington Post or MSNBC has breathed new life into once stale careers and burned reputations.

Despite making repeated threats and floating the names of several potential candidates, they have failed to produce a legitimate primary challenger to Trump. (Bill Kristol, the de facto head of NeverTrump Inc., last year claimed he was building a “war machine” to take on Trump in 2020, making this yet another war Kristol waged from the sidelines and lost.)

NeverTrumpers also failed to help Democrats run Trump out of the Oval Office, whether it was by promoting the egregious special counsel investigation into imaginary Russian collusion or supporting any and all empty calls for impeachment. They have not produced a detailed policy agenda to offer an alternative to Trumpism, only bromides about vague “principles.”

Now, armed with the same unjustified hubris and political fecklessness that turned once-influential conservatives into a punchline, NeverTrumpers are warning Democrats that they need to find some imaginary center so they can join forces to Dump Trump in 2020.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-republic-is-collapsing-the-time-to-act-is-now/

Commenting on Rush Limbaugh’s passionate denunciation of the spirit of anti-American leftism that is destroying the country, Lloyd Marcus, who blogs at The Unhyphenated American, agrees that the time has come to say “No!” He concludes, with Limbaugh, “It is time that we take action to take back our country. It is time that we say no to anti-American traitors and anti-biblical cultural assassins.”

This is a sentiment that cannot honorably be refuted. The problem is trying to decide what saying “No!” actually means. Merely saying “No!” is obviously a futile gesture and will produce little to nothing in the way of results. The question is how to translate “No!” into action. Debate and discussion with any of the manifestations of the left is a non-starter since the left does not debate or discuss. It adheres to a rigid orthodoxy that will allow no reconsideration or reflection on the putative axioms it regards as sacred. It is, in essence, the contemporary version of Bolshevism. The left will lie, slander, cheat and commit violence to further its goals. Its mind is deadbolted shut.

How, then, to say “No!” such that it realistically leads to discernible and effective consequences? Rhetoric won’t do it. The expression of noble sentiment won’t do it. Hand-wringing won’t do it. Prayer may, or may not, be a powerful factor; Lincoln is reputed to have said: “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” But one recalls the Frank Loesser song, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Remaining content with radio talk, podcasts, interviews, essays and articles that alert the public to the impending disaster, though not to be scanted, is only a necessary first step. Delivering an angry vote may stave off the brunt of the calamity for an interval, but will not significantly alter the dynamics. The answer is that a meaningful response requires material and demonstrable presidential action, as Lincoln knew in a time of national disintegration. Nothing less will do. Whether we like it or not, restitution now rests with Donald Trump.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/11/why-do-democrats-hate-jobs-so-much/

House Democrats, resistant to reason, continue to press for a minimum-wage hike even though a government report says it could cost as many as 3.7 million jobs. The party of the “working man” seems to have no problem throwing low-wage workers out on the streets.

The bill, which is headed to a floor vote, would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour over five years. The Congressional Budget Office says it could kill as many as 3.7 million jobs, with a median estimate of 1.3 million, should it become law. (To be fair, the low estimate is roughly zero job losses, which seems far less credible than the upper estimate of 3.7 million, simply because the laws of economics show that when goods or services cost more, in this case labor is the service, markets respond by buying less.)

Rep. Bobby Scott, Virginia Democrat, has dismissed the job losses and is instead focusing on the CBO’s estimate that the hike would increase wages for 17 million workers (which is plausible) and move 1.3 million families out of poverty. (Which seems unlikely, since only about half of minimum-wage workers are not yet 25 years old, a quarter are teens, 64% work part time, only 221,000 are older than 25, and the never-married outnumber the married about 4-to-1, which means most aren’t providing the primary income for a family.)

But reality should never be denied, and the facts show there can be no doubt that minimum-wage hikes, even previously government-mandated wages floors, are job killers — and tend to reduce family income, as well.