RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/15/maybe

A mob of protesters associated with the radical left-wing group Antifa swarmed the private residence of Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the night of Nov. 7. They yelled, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” The mob’s apparent aim was to catch Carlson’s family inside and so terrify them that he might temper his conservative views. Only Carlson’s wife was home at the time. She locked herself in a pantry and called police.

During the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrators disrupted the proceedings and stalked senators. Later, a mob broke through police barricades to pound on the doors of the Supreme Court while Kavanaugh was preparing to be sworn in. Their agenda apparently was to create such confusion and disorder that the nomination might be postponed.

Hollywood celebrities habitually boast of wanting to shoot, blow up or decapitate President Donald Trump. Apparently their furor is meant to lower the bar of violence so that Trump fears for his personal safety and therefore might silence or change his views.

Few of these protesters fear any legal consequences when they violate the law. Nor do those who disrupt public officials at restaurants, stalk them on their way to work or post their private information on the internet.

Yet most Americans are tired of hearing the lame excuses that the protesters’ supposedly noble ends justify their unethical or illegal means to achieve them.

On the other hand, the public does not wish to curb free speech or our First Amendment rights of expression. Journalists certainly have the right to unprofessionally lecture and sermonize instead of just posing questions to public officials. But they still set a poor example of journalistic behavior and disinterested reporting while confirming the public’s low esteem for their entire profession.

Most people do not believe that the overseers of Facebook, Google and Twitter possess either the wisdom or the ethics to censor the sort of social media that most people find objectionable. Yet the pubic tires of the anonymous hitmen on social media who post vicious lies to ruin the reputations of their perceived enemies.

The trick, then, is to distinguish between illegal behavior (which should be prosecuted) and improper behavior (which should be shamed).

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“The purpose of government is to enable the people to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the people, not the governors.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Last weeks’ election was a manifestation of the fortune that is ours to live in this country. Forty-seven percent of the electorate (110 million people) cast ballots. That would compare with 36.7% in 2014 and 41% in 2010. While results were not as I would have liked, especially here in Connecticut where voters are in denial as to the fiscal situation, they were a reminder of the first two parts of Lincoln’s famous sentence uttered at Gettysburg, “…a government of the people, by the people…” Now, it is incumbent on those elected to ensure it is “…for the people…”

It is important to remember that, while our government was forged from a cauldron of revolution, the Founders understood the need for order – for government – for without it a liberal, civil society cannot function. Its antithesis is either anarchy or tyranny. And the Founders, despite combatting the British, knew that what they sought was based on a philosophy derived from, among others, such British figures of the enlightenment as John Locke, David Hume and Thomas Hobbes and precedents drawn from English common law. As well, the Founders would have been familiar with Adam Smith through his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and a few may have read The Wealth of Nations, published in March 1776. While desirous of a country where people might pray as they choose, they recognized that the principles embedded in their Christian-Judeo heritage were fundamental to the morality and virtue they espoused and that they expected of those elected to serve.

Ronald Reagan once deadpanned that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Humorless and patronizing Leftists, who always portrayed Mr. Reagan as a dunce, repeated his words, but without the whimsey. Mr. Reagan’s point was that people cannot live freely when government becomes too big, that people lose their sense of self-reliance as dependency on “Big Brother” grows – and that autocracies can emerge from the left, from those who operate from gift-giving platforms. President Obama’s “Life of Julia” was an Orwellian (and frightening) indication of the direction he wanted to take the country.

As I see it, the purpose of our federal government is:

To establish laws, so that a free people can live harmoniously in civil society under the rule of law, not men.
To protect all citizens against any diminution of natural rights, rooted in the Constitution and that bear fruit in the Bill of Rights.
To ensure that laws are obeyed, and to safe-guard the people against harm from home or abroad, (but not, as President Reagan once warned, to protect people against their own follies).
To ensure that a balance is maintained between government’s three branches – executive, legislative and judiciary.
To recognize that all citizens have equal rights – that the value of a vote is not determined by race, gender, religion, or the social and/or economic standing of the individual.
To establish treaties with foreign nations.
To enable interstate and international commerce through the building and maintaining of roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and sea ports, and to ensure that the skies and the seas remain free for the trade and transportation of goods and services.
To maintain a postal service and sound currency.
To promote the general welfare of the public.

a) To help provide for the elderly, the infirm and those unable to provide for themselves.
b) To conserve and protect national forests and parks, for the enjoyment of all people.
c) To help re-build communities when they have been devastated by natural disasters.
d) To regulate foods and medicines and other consumable products that may be harmful.
e) To ensure that youth is provided a basic education, including knowledge of history and civics, but leaving details to states and local governments

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21783/collectivism-and-the-8th-commandment

In the 18th century our Founding Fathers fought the War of Independence to escape the tyranny of the British monarchy. Our Founding Fathers envisioned a New World where citizens of the United States of America would be bound by the Constitution and live as free individuals in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The 10 Commandments were foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the United States and to its ordered liberty. The Commandments provided the infrastructure and moral basis for the secular laws written to govern American society.

The separation of church and state was an acknowledgement that different religious doctrines existed within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment was a defense against the tyranny of an official state religion.

What our Founding Fathers did not envision was the secular tyranny of collectivism – collectivism is a late 19th century political ideology.

“Thou Shalt Not Steal” is the 8th Commandment that strictly forbids stealing. So, let’s talk about stealing – the taking of another person’s property.

Stealing assumes a separation between self and other and is an acknowledgement of property rights. That is, one person cannot take another person’s property unless both parties acknowledge that each person has a separate existence and that property belonging to one is not the property of the other.

There would be no moral injunction against stealing and no Commandment or secular law against stealing without this fundamental acknowledgement.

The problem with collectivism, whether it is socialism or communism, is that it defies this most fundamental acknowledgement. Collectivism denies the property rights of an individual and, therefore, that individual’s existence as a separate entity.

Collectivism says that what is yours belongs to the state and the state is the entity that determines its distribution. Theoretically, without property rights there are no human rights because if what I produce is not mine and the fruits of my labors belong to the state, then I do not belong to myself. I am without human rights.

Collectivist ideology is antagonistic to the Judeo-Christian tradition because it denies the existence of the self. In collectivism the individual’s life belongs to the group.

This most fundamental and critical issue of property rights and its connection to human rights and the self is denied by the humanitarian hucksters selling socialism. When Obama tells business owners “You did not build that” he is denying their human rights and misappropriating them to the state. Obama is the prime time humanitarian huckster disingenuously selling socialism as the provider of social justice and income equality. He is the consummate con man deceitfully selling “resistance” as freedom fighting.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3799/The-Phony-War.aspx

Returning from a few days away, I find several emails alerting me to a recent pronouncement by David Horowitz on his supposed rift with Ronald Radosh.

Supposed…?

Truth be told, every time I happen to write either of those two names, I stop, halted by misgivings over wasted time and thought. Why throw any more of either at these two longtime prevaricators now pretending to be at odds?

Pretending…?

It’s just a notion, but I think it has some appeal. If only to avoid thinking about the midterm elections now in progress (Vote GOP!), I’ll tease it out for a bit. Maybe there’s something there.

Background (there’s always background): On August 18, 2017, FP appeared to cast Radosh out of its orbit in a curious article by Daniel Greenfield. The headline, likely by Horowitz, was: “NEVER TRUMP DRIVES A FORMER COMMUNIST BACK TO HIS ROOTS: What happens when you lose every principle except hating Trump.”

The average reader surely expects that the “roots” to which “former Communist” Radosh is alleged to be returning are Communism. What else? Reading the headline and then skimming the article the first time around, I remember getting the feeling the piece came up short. Forcing myself through a second time, I find the “roots” Radosh is “returning” to are “McCarthyism accusations.”

McCarthyism accusations?

Guess what, gang? Radosh never left those roots. I know. In 2013, at FP, Radosh dubbed me “McCarthy’s heiress,” and Horowitz called American Betrayal “McCarthyism on Steroids.” (Quote Horowitz: “She should not have written that book.”)

So, who are they trying to kid? You. Everyone. They return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, ho hum, and then pretend it’s a big deal to return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, woo woo.

Thus, to underscore, the 2017 FP piece does not accuse Radosh of returning to Communism — or even to the Left. The point Greenfield makes is that Radosh, as a “Never Trumper,” has no beliefs, just spite and malice against Trump.

In FP’s telling, then, it is just as if Donald Trump were not the counter-revolutionary figure that he is, and that Never Trump and its allies in the so-called Resistance were not attempting to save the Revolution from his mighty, providential assault.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/why-nationalism-better-cultural-pluralism/575458/

We all have books that have influenced how we make sense of the world. One of my favorites is Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, a short book by the Canadian American historian William McNeill that was first published in 1985. I recently learned that McNeill died in the summer of 2016, not long after Britain voted to leave the European Union and shortly before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. It occurs to me that McNeill would have had a great deal to say about the reassertion of nationalism around the world, and I regret that he is not here to share his thoughts with us. This is not because I expect that McNeill would echo my own beliefs—indeed, I am confident he would not—but rather because his work might help reorient our perspective.

Though McNeill was very much a skeptic of nationalism, he taught me, in a roundabout way, to appreciate its virtues. Critics of nationalism often point to the fact that it is a relatively novel doctrine, and they’re not wrong to do so. What they tend to neglect, however, is that the same can be said of nationalism’s chief rival: the ideal of a cultural pluralism that is bereft of hierarchy. In liberal circles, “nationalism” is typically understood as a divisive, exclusionary force, usually in implicit contrast with some form of cultural pluralism, and so to identify as a nationalist is to declare oneself a chauvinist.

But as McNeill suggests, nationalism can be understood as a unifying alternative to a society built on polyethnic hierarchy, in which a series of hereditary ethnic castes live together in uneasy peace, usually with some dominating the others. It is polyethnic hierarchy that has been the norm throughout modern history, not national unity or egalitarian pluralism. One could argue that the dream of pluralism without hierarchy is at least as chimerical as that of an egalitarian nationalism built on the melting and fusing together of once-distinct groups, if not far more so. McNeill’s stylized history gives us a sense of what we’re up against as we try to build decent and humane societies amidst entrenched ethnic divisions, and why so many modern thinkers have embraced the politics of national unity.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/11/progressive-politics-
Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity politics tribalism.

According to this progressive orthodoxy, being female, gay, or minority trumps everything else. But, of course, no one believes in such mythical notions of solidarity, least of all progressives themselves.

White women were expected in Michigan, for example, to vote against a sterling African-American senatorial candidate John James, whose résumé was far more impressive than his victorious opponent, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow.

There was no such thing as minorities on the collective barricades when it was a matter of defeating California congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, first-generation child of refugees, Asian, female, former Stanford student body president, and Yale MBA in her singular bid to unseat a seven-term white male Democratic incumbent.

The outraged identity politics industry has entered the realm of insanity when it screams at the “treason” of white women while bragging that 95 percent of black women voted for a white male Robert O’Rourke against Latino Ted Cruz—while deploring that 59 percent of white women who voted against white male O’Rourke.

In fact, progressive advocates sought to ensure that lots of black, Asian, and Latino men and women lost their senate, congressional, and state house races anytime they were pitted against white-male or white-female left-wing opponents, often with far more power, money, and influence at their disposal.

So dispense once and for all with the idea of the universal sisterhood of identity politics. Or at least recalibrate and redefine minority status as being a progressive of any race or gender first, and, only incidentally, female or nonwhite.

Yesterday, November 11, 2018, marked the 100th anniversary the end of World War 1 and Veterans’ Day which honors all those persons who served in all America’s armed forces. In 1954 at the urging of veterans’ groups Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day.

The “war to end all wars” failed to do so and murderous ideologies – Nazi and Marxist- were to wreak death and destruction for most of what the eminent British historian Robert Conquest called “A Ravaged Century.”

In the name of peace, treaties and pacts, negotiations and appeasement were attempted with implacable enemies. The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah warned of the false promises of peace, but perhaps the secular poet Emily Dickinson said it best:

I many times thought Peace had come
When Peace was far away —
As Wrecked Men — deem they sight the Land —
At Centre of the Sea —
And struggle slacker — but to prove
As hopelessly as I —
How many the fictitious Shores —
Before the Harbor be.

rsk

https://quillette.com/2018/11/06/how-the-metoo-movement

The complainant, whom I’ll call Chloe, wept as she labored through her testimony. At several points, she was so overcome by emotion that court proceedings had to pause for a break. Throughout that first day of the preliminary hearing, she projected a sense of soft-spoken vulnerability, but also a certain inner strength. In the hallway outside the courtroom, she was surrounded by trained victim-services support workers, who helped her family avoid contact with the accused.

As an observer in court that day back in 2016, I can attest that Chloe appeared highly credible. She seemed intent on answering every question to the best of her ability. On the drive home from the British Columbia courthouse where the proceedings were taking place, a colleague who’d accompanied me concluded, quite simply: “She’s very believable.”

It had been a year since the alleged assault. Still, she was able to summon up details that brought those past events to life. Her speaking style was natural and unaffected. Absent-mindedly pulling the sleeves of a somewhat ill-fitting cardigan sweater down toward her wrists, she recounted tearfully how the accused had acted after the assault, mocking her for not being able to look him in the eyes.

Chloe seemed to remember the words that the accused had used that day as if they were burned into her mind. “You’ll like this, just trust me,” and “You should be thankful I’m doing this to you. I could have any girl.”

I felt sorry for her—even though I suspected that the story she’d just told us was about to fall apart.

* * *

For several years now, I have regularly observed Canadian sexual-assault proceedings, as part of my work with a non-profit organization called the Lighthouse Project. Many of these sexual-assault prosecutions hinge entirely on the credibility of the alleged victim and the alleged assailant. In some cases, journalists will say that there is “no evidence” presented in these cases. But, as lawyers are quick to point out, testimony is evidence.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

You won’t know this if your information comes mainly from the NYT and the WSJ, but Alyssa Milano (founder of MeToo) has withdrawn from the Women’s March to protest its organizers’ support of Louis Farrakhan. Leader of Nation of Islam, Farrakhan chanted “Death to the U.S” and “Death to Jews” while in Iran last week, while on the domestic front, he denied being an anti-semite and called himself an “anti-termite” instead. Linda Sarsour, a self-described brown Palestinian and Tamika Mallory, an African-American have endorsed the statement that “no Zionist can be a feminist” and Mallory refers to Farrakhan as “goat” – greatest of all time.

Alyssa Milano is not Jewish but has said, “Any time that there is bigotry or anti-semitism in that respect, it needs to be called out and addressed. I’m disappointed in the leadership of the Women’s March that they haven’t done it adequately.” How should American Jews feel about their own failed leadership in not uttering a word of protest or refusing to participate themselves. We’re used to seeing Jews at the forefront of anti-discrimination for almost every group in the world, yet rabbis were urging their congregants to join the first March Against Trump at which Sarsour made her unequivocal decree that Zionists were unfit to participate. Where was the Jewish Queen of Feminism – Gloria Steinem, or our very political Barbra Streisand, not to mention all other Jewish politicians who are so on top of trigger words like “nationalist.” Where was Chuck Schumer who calibrates every word Trump utters but has been silent about that Death to Jews from the man who stood on the same platform as Bill Clinton in the recent past.

On behalf of all Jewish people who understand the danger that comes from the anti-semitism of the left, I thank Alyssa Milano for her unsolicited moral reproach to the organizers of the Women’s March (who also support BDS )and all its followers who should have thought twice about whose path they were following the first time but have no excuse of ignorance this time around.

On November 9, 1938 on Kristallnacht Nazis rampaged throughout Germany murdering Jews, pillaging their homes, businesses and belongings, and destroying synagogues. Thus began the final unraveling of Jewish life in Germany. When it was over one in every three Jews in the world was murdered. They had no guns. Please read this:

What Truly Caused the Pogrom of 1938 By Gary Gindler

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/what_truly_caused_the_pogrom_of_1938.html