RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Most Americans do not realize that the Federal Reserve is NOT constitutionally part of the United States Government and is not even a bank! The Federal Reserve is a system. International banker Marilyn Barnewall explains that the Federal Reserve System is a privately held corporation owned by bankers and it is most definitely not part of the federal government.

The Federal Reserve Act that created the Federal Reserve System (Fed) was passed in Congress on December 22, 1913 and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson the next day. Barnewall describes the dramatic effects of its passage.

“The Act transferred the right to print currency from the United States Congress to an independent and privately-owned entity calling itself a bank but which is not a bank and changing the Constitution which cannot be changed without Amending it. The Fed is somewhat federal in form, but is very privately owned and operated. President Wilson lived to regret signing The Federal Reserve Act and on his deathbed is quoted as saying:

‘I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.'”

So, who are these men and why was President Wilson so remorseful about signing the Federal Reserve Act? And why is the Federal Reserve System so disingenuously named that the average citizen assumes it is a banking institution and part of the federal government?

Sometimes it is necessary to look back to understand the present and anticipate the future.

Academy award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence recently announced her plan to take a break from her acting career in order to “fix our democracy.” The 27-year-old celebrity told Entertainment Tonight that she will work with an organization, “Represent.US,” to “get young people engaged politically on a local level.” “It doesn’t have anything to do with partisan [politics],” she said of her involvement with the non-profit organization. “It’s just anti-corruption and stuff trying to pass state by state laws that can help prevent corruption.”

Like many celebrities, Lawrence was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2016 election. She justified her support on the grounds of Clinton’s experience and technocratic pedigree. “I’m like, ‘I want a career politician!’ I wouldn’t hire an assistant if they didn’t have experience,” Lawrence explained. “We’re talking about the president of the f—king United States!” But there seems little utility in encouraging young people to engage in politics just to persuade them that “fixing our democracy” means becoming activists for entrenched politicians intent on growing the administrative state.

The American experiment in self-government requires citizens who understand both government’s purpose and their own responsibilities as citizens. We cannot delegate the responsibility of governing to “experts” within the administrative state and remain self-governing citizens in a constitutional republic. If we want to “fix our democracy,” we need better citizens before we can expect better politicians.

Lawrence’s faith in career politicians’ expertise is nothing new. In August 1955 Philadelphia’s progressive Mayor Joseph S. Clark Jr. wrote “Wanted: Better Politicians” for The Atlantic. Clark described the late-19th century as a“relatively uncomplicated” time when “men still quoted with approval Jefferson’s dictum that government is best when governing least.” Progressing past this era required progressing past the ideas which accompanied it. Simple men with simple ideas were ill-equipped to govern themselves in a more complicated and advanced modern time. Clark praised Woodrow Wilson as having been “the country’s leading authority on American government,” which made Wilson uniquely qualified for the role as our lead administrator. Clark’s thesis is indicative of how many progressives think: in order to solve government’s inefficiencies, we need more members from society’s elite and professional class in control.

In his splendid book ” Reflections on a Ravaged Century” Robert Conquest reminds us that in the aftermath of World War 2, the atrocities continued and the century’s monsters -Mao and Stalin enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of people and the media and academic elites gave them a pass. This column is from 2016 and has more detail on the political Left’s abandonment of morality.

Why do we indulge the crimes of the Left? Ed West

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/indulge-crimes-left/

What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm:

Ignatieff: In 1934 … millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a communist?

Hobsbawm: … Probably not.

Ignatieff: Why?

Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing … The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and unnecessarily great. But I’m looking back on it now and I’m saying that is because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure …

Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?

Hobsbawm: Yes.

Hobsbawm was an unrepentant supporter of a system that killed millions and, as Nick Cohen has pointed out, surely would have killed him.

Laden with honours throughout his life by the liberal democratic system, he went to his grave believing that all the murder had been worth it in order to achieve this deluded fantasy of a worker’s paradise. So powerful is ideology that a man can be brilliant in his field, which is after all the study of the human condition, and yet at the same time totally blind to one form of evil.

But then he was hardly alone, and many intelligent, well-informed people are still at best ambivalent about the crimes of the Soviet Union, Communist China and the other Marxist states. I hear there may even be one or two in politics today.

It was an unseasonably cold night, but I made the trek from Harlem to a meetup in Brooklyn. The organizers promised a night of big ideas and freethinking; the group thread included a quote from David Bohm about the virtue of free dialogue. But as with many such meetups in New York, I was quickly disappointed.

Instead of open minds and lively debate, I found dogmatic progressive ideology and groupthink. One attendee told me that I, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, am “no better than Roger Ailes” because my company aggregates both liberal and conservative commentaries and thereby is “pushing a right-wing agenda.” Someone else said: “Trump supporters are so stupid . . . they think the tax bill was a good deal because they got back—what, a few thousand a year?”

I don’t claim to have the answers. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite. I went to high school on the Upper East Side, graduated from Bryn Mawr, and once made a six-figure salary at a Big Four accounting firm.

Still, I know that burying our heads in the sand and hoping everyone we disagree with goes away is not an effective solution. TheFlipSide.io has received lots of positive and constructive feedback from liberals and conservatives. But the most unconstructive criticism we’ve received comes from the left:

• “We need to convince the Trump supporters they’ve been duped.”

When I was a young girl and Israel was one year old, my family- parents and my “kid”brother and I traveled to Israel. I confess to callow boredom as my parents met friends and distant relatives from Poland. We tired of the retelling of unending grief and disbelief . The Holocaust was the significant event in our education and our lives. All our relatives- cousins, aunts, grandparents- were all killed – and we were schooled in the horror.

One hot morning on a drive to Beersheba, the car broke down and when we got out there was a whirring sound in the air. As we looked up we saw airplanes in formation….they looked small and tinny but they had the Star of David on the underside of both wings.

My father started to cheer and wave madly and my brother shouted “Jewish planes! Jewish planes!” and that was an epiphany for me. Imagine! Airplanes and an army in our ancient homeland to defend that precious link that started in Hebron with the Patriarchs . Other great civilizations crumbled and Jews survived in spite of unending oppression and genocide and there we were on sacred ground again. My love for Israel has been a lifelong commitment of pride in its accomplishments and outsize contribution to the welfare of the entire world.

As Bret Stevens put it so well on anti-Semitism in our century: “For Jews, it’s a painful, useful reminder that Israel is not their vanity. It’s their safeguard.”

The British philosopher John Gray is not someone to shy away from ‘difficult’ topics. If you are looking for a provocative long read this weekend, his new article in the Times Literary Supplement ought to be a contender. I didn’t agree with all of it (for example, I would argue that the supposedly secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century—essentially millenarian sects, as Gray rightly observes—were even more ‘religious’ than even he would claim), not that that matters.

Above all, Gray’s take on where the arguments of John Stuart Mill, one of the saints of traditional liberalism, have led is, to say the least, intriguing.

An extract:

[Mill’s] assertion that human beings would prefer intellectual freedom over contented conformity was at odds with his empiricist philosophy. Essentially unfalsifiable, it was a matter of faith.

While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.

That may or may not be true, but at least Mill recognized its essentially religious nature, not that that took much doing.

Since the election of Donald Trump, prominent American Jews, notably in the Reform movement and among the intelligentsia, have lamented the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism, seeing it as the greatest threat to their community in the United States. The rise of xenophobic and often marginally anti-Jewish parties in Eastern Europe—even with fewer Jews left there to persecute—has deepened the alarm. Yet by far the greatest threat to Jews, not only here but also abroad, comes not from zombie fascist retreads, but from the Left, which is increasingly making its peace with anti-Semitism.

This shift was first made clear to me about 15 years ago when, along with my wife Mandy, whose mother is a Holocaust survivor from France, I visited the legendary Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. They predicted that the primary threat to Jews in Europe increasingly would come not from the centuries-old French Right, some of whom had supported the Nazis, but from the Left, in alliance with a growing Muslim population. Time has proved their assertion to be, for the most part, on target. In Sweden, for instance, never known for its persecution of Jews, only 5 percent of all anti-Semitic incidents, notes the New York Times, involved the far Right, while Muslims and leftists accounted for the rest. Germany’s recent rash of anti-Semitic incidents has coincided with the mass migration of people from regions where hostility to both Jews and Israel is commonplace. At European universities, where pro-Nazi sentiments were once widely shared, anti-Israel sentiments are increasingly de rigueur. The growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aimed at cutting all ties with Israel, often allies itself with anti-Jewish Islamist groups, some with eliminationist agendas for Palestine’s Jews.

Of course, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not identical. One can criticize some Israeli policies—as many American Jews do, for example, on the expansion of settlements—without being an anti-Semite. But, as the liberal French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy argues, targeting the Jewish state while ignoring far more brutal, homophobic, and profoundly misogynist Muslim states represents a double standard characteristic of anti-Semitic prejudice. European progressives increasingly embrace this double standard. Generally speaking, the further left the European politician, the closer his ties to Islamist groups who seek the destruction of Jews in Palestine. Many left-wing parties—the French socialists, for example—depend more and more on Arab and Muslim voters, who come from countries where more than 80 percent of the public holds strongly anti-Jewish views. The Left’s animus toward Jewish causes has spread to Great Britain, where Labour Party head Jeremy Corbyn counts the leaders of openly anti-Semitic groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as allies. If Corbyn becomes Britain’s next prime minister—no longer inconceivable, given his strong showing in the last election—the consequences for Israel, and for Britain’s dwindling Jewish community, could be troubling.

It’s six months since #MeToo began trending on social media. Since then, those two little words have sparked a conversation about the sexual harassment of women that has spread across the globe and into every walk of life. Half a year on it’s time to take stock and ask what women have gained from this movement.

The accusations made against Harvey Weinstein by numerous actors and employees and reaching back over decades are by now skin-crawlingly familiar. Yet the New York Times story in which actress Ashley Judd and others first publicly detailed Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct, leading to his resignation just three days later, could have made headlines for a week and then been consigned to history. Instead, the story continued apace and the list of victims—and those accused—grew.

One week later, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Milano hadn’t realized she was employing a phrase first coined by activist Tarana Burke as a means of offering solidarity to women victims of sexual violence. More than a decade later, and with celebrity backing, #MeToo spread rapidly to become a global movement that extended far beyond social media.

Joining in with #MeToo is an attractive proposition. Women sharing their stories become part of a community (albeit one that exists more in their imagination than in reality); they gain validation for their suffering and the moral beatification afforded to innocent victims. Significantly, #MeToo doesn’t appear to be about women wallowing in victimhood; on the contrary, it seems empowering. The more high-profile men that were accused, found guilty following trial by social media, and left with livelihoods and reputations ruined, the more the #MeToo movement grew emboldened.

No doubt some men have abused the power they held over women: they should be tried in a court of law and, if found guilty, punished accordingly. But those of us seriously concerned about women’s rights need to move beyond the euphoria of belonging to a powerful movement and honestly appraise the impact of #MeToo. When we do, we find a number of reasons to be concerned.

#MeToo has become an orthodoxy intolerant of criticism or even question. Women who have suggested that it may have gone too far, that conflating rape with crude flirtation risks trivializing serious incidents and falsely demonizing innocent men, have been hounded for thought crimes. Katie Roiphe prompted outrage when it was rumored she might go public with a list of “shitty media men” that had been widely circulated among writers and journalists. Roiphe recalls that “Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me ‘pro-rape,’ ‘human scum,’ a ‘harridan,’ a ‘monster out of Stephen King’s “IT”‘ a ‘ghoul,’ a ‘bitch,’ and a ‘garbage person.’” Catherine Deneuve and over 100 other prominent French women were met with a similar tsunami of name-calling and criticism following their public letter comparing #MeToo to a witch hunt. The result has been a censorious closing down of debate through a crude division between “good women” who stick to the #MeToo script and “bad women” who digress.

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