RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20190319/my-turn-mackubin-thomas-owens-ignoring-socialisms-countless-corpses

An old joke goes like this: Q. What did socialists use before candles? A. Electricity.

I’m sure the people of Venezuela aren’t laughing. But as the people of this once-prosperous country scrounge for food in trash bags and go without electricity and running water, some in our own country seriously sing the praises of socialism. Allegedly well-educated individuals remain on the socialism bandwagon even as Venezuela circles the drain.

What accounts for this phenomenon? Why is socialism so popular with young people? Why did they rally to Bernie Sanders in 2016?

Why do they lionize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s shiny new thing? AOC, as the press has dubbed her, graduated cum laude from Boston University with a degree in economics and international relations. I taught for a while at Boston University in the 1990s and got to know the late John Silber, BU’s president, who turned the school into an excellent institution. He must be spinning in his grave.

How could someone graduate from a well-respected university and be as ignorant of basic economics as this woman?

To answer this question, it is useful to look to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who in the early 20th century stressed the importance of “cultural hegemony” as the means of establishing the conditions for a Marxist revolution.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/15/new-zealand-the-barbarism-of-identity-politics/
EXCERPT

As we offer our solidarity, we also want to try to understand why things like this happen. Understandably, there has been a rush to locate this barbaric act within a broader political framework. Sadly, this has given rise to a speedy and ghoulish exploitation of the atrocity to make political mileage. Already observers are pinning the blame on certain right-wing commentators, or on the Western media more broadly, claiming that criticism of Muslim immigration or of Islam generates this kind of violent hatred. Already some are calling for clampdowns on Islamophobia and for the expunging from the internet of certain hard-right voices. It will strike many of us, especially those of us who are humanists, as perverse and disturbing that people would so swiftly use a bloody act to further their own narrow agendas of social control and censorship; that they would use a massacre almost as an exclamation point to their already existing demands for the demonisation and punishment of particular opinions. It is cynical and inhuman.

Furthermore, it feels wrong. To fold this barbarism into a narrative about a surging threat of white supremacy or even Islamophobia overlooks what feels terrifyingly mainstream about the ideas that appear to have energised and inspired this racist mass murderer – namely, the politics of identity. To read the killer’s alleged manifesto, as currently being covered by CNN, the New York Times and others, is to gain a horrible glimpse into the cultural fragmentation and racial paranoia unleashed by the relentless rise of identitarianism.

Increasingly, it feels like the New Zealand atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures whose relationship with other cultural and racial cultures must be monitored and managed, comes to be the only game in public life.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/19/the-only-option-they-had-as-pseudo-conservatives/

“As if by prophecy, the next article the Bulwark posted was: “Is Socialism Really that Big of a Threat?”

It’s been a tough two years if you’re a post-Reagan era, Bush-flunky fake conservative.

Between America winning the Cold War and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the RINO-gravy-train had treated you well. Even if you were a former leftist, the “elite” of New York and Washington were happy to let you make a phony Damascene conversion to the side that won the ideological war of the 20th century, drop your questionable political past down the memory hole, and reinvent yourself as a lifelong Buckleyite.

You believed the rest of your life could consist of your collecting fat honoraria checks from both sides of the uniparty establishment. From AEI to Brookings, from CATO to the Council on Foreign Relations, you also milked a handful of gullible right-wing donors and bloviated your pedestrian “analysis” for the hosts of the cable shows you cared for the most—naturally, on CNN. This despite the fact that America really didn’t seem to care. At least not if we judge by the viewing statistics.

How anyone still talks about CNN at all is a question that continues to mystify me. Even CNN‘s “hottest” shows are mostly ignored by more than 99 percent of the U.S. population. On a good night, Anderson Cooper, can only garner 800,000 real viewers (as opposed to people trapped at an airport waiting to board a plane). That’s 0.25 percent of the population of our republic. Seriously guys, can’t we just ignore them? Back to the fakers.

For decades they planted themselves at publications such as National Review and the Weekly Standard which lost their viability as market products but nevertheless chugged along, read by a smaller and smaller group of believers and fellow-travelers, funded as they were by the same handful of well-meaning but credulous sugar-daddies. You know their names: Bill Kristol, Stephen Hays, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, to name but a few. Then on November 8, 2016, America fired them all.

https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/u-s-marine-dragged-through-mogadishu/
The photos taken by Canadian photographer Paul Watson, of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu spelled the beginning of the end for U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force. Domestic opinion turned hostile as horrified TV viewers watched images of the bloodshed—-including this Pulitzer-prize winning footage of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed’s supporters dragging the body of U.S. Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, cheering.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/18/fbi-shouldnt-prosecuting-college-fraud-rooting-corruption/

As we watch the FBI investigate and help bring criminal charges against scores of wealthy individuals for fraud because they paid some middleman to alter their kids’ college entrance exams or bribe college officials to claim their kids were recruited athletes, I can only think: What chutzpah!

The FBI may have committed the grossest fraud in the history of our country by trying to throw a presidential election through a fraudulent counterintelligence investigation of “Trump-Russia collusion,” using the massive legal and technological authorities at their disposal. And we’re supposed to get worked up by The Greatest College Admissions Fraud Scandal of All Time.

Now, let me be clear (to channel my inner Barack Obama). I am not condoning the payment of enormous sums of money by some rich, pompous parents so some guy can pay some obviously ethically challenged university employees to lie about those parents’ kids having athletic talent so they can be admitted to overpriced, overrated colleges. Or paying a guy to have some minions alter answers on college entrance exams.

Ethically, that is clearly wrong. But should it be criminal? I highly doubt it. Very wealthy parents routinely donate huge sums of money to colleges to fund an endowed chair or to construct a new building, often with the expectation that it will improve the chances of their academically mediocre children being admitted to that university. That’s what the alleged scammer-in-chief in this tale, Rick Singer, called the “back door” to admission to elite universities.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/17/when-presidential-character-once-mattered/

Here’s why I did not vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan—despite their records.

1944: Sorry, I am not voting for a fourth term for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s a vindictive character and has brought disrepute into the White House. When he didn’t get his way, he pouted and tried to pack the Supreme Court. When critics went after him, he threatened them with targeted regulations and taxes to silence them. He signed the order putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps—another one of his “executive orders” that he so often has abused.

Then there are those rumors. Have we ever had a president who used his own daughter as a conduit to conduct an affair while in the White House? And who knows what Eleanor was doing at the time? Why hide the truth about his health? Anybody who sees or hears the president, knows his army of conspiratorial aides are lying about his ailments as they always do. We’ve known all along that he was paralyzed—and not simply partially disabled, when his braces and aides staged his standing up to make us believe he could almost walk.

The president is now wasting away. Rumors are that his blood pressure is dangerously high and won’t go down. It’s Woodrow Wilson all over again, when they lied that his stroke was never serious, even as the guy was near comatose as his wife ran the country. FDR’s advisors know that he won’t make it six months if elected a fourth time. (What president before has even run for a third term?) They are hiding that fact to make sure the Democrats keep control of the presidency once he dies in office. There should be a constitutional amendment or something to remove an incapacitated president.

I cannot vote for a candidate who flat out deceives the American people. Character is destiny, and without it policy means nothing. Storming Normandy was a brilliant success, but it should not come at cost of endorsing an adulterous president. Even if FDR is leading us to global victory, his record is stained by his mendacity.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/14/the-sudden-unpopularity-of-neoliberal-

EXCERPT:…..” This is especially relevant with the mainstreaming of intersectionality as an analytical framework. Here, people are represented as being intersected by a number of oppressive systems, including capitalism. Now, some people have argued that intersectionality with all its many different systems of oppression, especially those related to race, gender, and sexuality, shift the focus away from class. (And thus from wealthy individuals and corporations.) This is true, but probably only for the short term. In the long term, it seems apparent that capitalism will become more and more central.

Ultimately, there’s a good argument that corporations and wealthy individuals who engage in modern social progressivism with its basis in critical theory are sawing the branch they’re sitting on. While they might themselves see no conflict between laissez-faire capitalism and social progressivism, they’re contributing to the build-up of a mainstream worldview that sees society as consisting of oppressive systems to be dismantled, and capitalism naturally fits at the top of the intersectional matrix.

Add to this a culture where attacks on privilege have become quite common and where people are fearful of being associated with it, and where anything that can be construed as a defence of privilege is considered unacceptable, and now imagine that this shifts from racial- and gender privilege to class privilege, even to a modest degree. I suspect we’re going to see more instances like this, where people like Schultz all of a sudden find themselves under attack by progressives and are blindsided by it.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22455/mohammed-favorite-color

America has been sleeping while the long term globalist plan of one world government is quietly being implemented through United Nation’s policies promoting population control in America and then mass immigration to replace the declining population. The objective is to build a permanent progressive majority Democrat ruling class that will eventually impose the final solution of one world government at the voting booths.

The radical “progressive” faction that has overrun the Democrat party in the United States has been referred to as the Red-Green axis. Investigative reporter James Simpson details the progressive movement’s objective in his 2015 report “Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration, and the Agenda to Erase America.”

The open borders agenda is not new. It was framed in the Vancouver Plan of Action at the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. The UN envisioned redistributed wealth and redistributed populations as the great equalizer that would bring sameness to the world – their final solution. One merged global population, one merged global language, one merged global currency, and one ruling global government to control the infantilized global population.

What is wrong with this comprehensive global merger promoted in spiritual terms as the great humanitarian solution to the world’s instability and rapidly depleting resources?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13

The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.

In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.

In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad.

The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.

In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves—154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states.

There is also a renewed crusade to erase the memory of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Los Angeles removed a Columbus statue in November based on the premise that his 1492 discovery of the Americas began a disastrous genocide in the Western Hemisphere.

https://canadafreepress.com/members/1/JoanSwirsky/130

”…the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.” —President Donald J. Trump”…the chickens of the Democratic Party are coming home to roost…maybe then they will also realize that anti-Semitism, like most cancers, is fatal unless it’s removed.” —Michael Goodwin, NY Post

Most people thought antisemitism had been relegated to the trash bin of history after Hitler and millions of his willing German-Polish-Austrian-French-Swiss-Belgium executioners—with savage premeditation—murdered six-million Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s, and the world—significantly after the fact—seemed to wake up to the psychotic, irrational, obsessed nature of Jew hatred.

But today, less than 75 years after the founding of Israel, Jew hatred has emerged from the cesspool in which it festers. The maniacal obsession with Jews is on the rise, not only throughout the Middle East and Europe—France, England, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Belgium, et al—but it is also contaminating America the Beautiful!