RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/our-current-maelstrom?token=

I was pleased to join the American commentator, Dave Rubin, on his show The Rubin Report. After acknowledging some of the milestones on my own political journey over the years, we talked about the great movements of thought that have precipitated our current cultural maelstrom on both sides of the Atlantic.

For me, the immediate cause of this turmoil lies in the terminal weakness of liberalism: its embrace of cultural relativism, the doctrine that all cultures and lifestyles have equal value. This prevents liberals from acknowledging that their core values, such as respect for all human life, freedom of conscience or equality for women, make the west superior to cultures which deny freedom and equality and treat human life as expendable.

The tragic paradox of liberalism is therefore this: that its core value of equality means it can’t uphold and defend its values, institutions and historic traditions in order to ensure its own survival. That’s why the west is in such trouble.

I also talked about how conservatism, which no longer understands what it needs to conserve, has lost the cultural plot. Oh – and how the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president signalled a fight-back by millions who are not prepared to stand by passively as their civilisation disintegrates.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-for-the-czar-its-important-11598895028A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse.

A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse.

American politics are in such a scramble that we need to think about how we vote, not just for whom. Should our choice be determined by party loyalty, policy, the perceived qualities of the candidates? I turned conservative when I learned to vote for the lesser of evils.

That lesson was unexpected. On my first trip to Poland, in 1978, I was put in touch with a woman who offered to show me around the Jewish ruins. She was an excellent guide, but as we came to the memorial for the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, she said that I could learn about that phase of Jewish history on my own. What she had to tell me, however, I could hear only from her.

In the late 1920s in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), she had been a student of the Jewish literary historian Max Erik, a fervent Communist who one day stole across the sealed border to the Soviet Union so that he could join the great socialist experiment. Radicalized by him, she had joined the Communist Party, which was illegal in Poland. She followed his example and emigrated several years later. But once in Soviet territory, she was arrested as a “Polish spy” and sent to labor camps in the Gulag. In the last of them, she met her former teacher—before his execution in 1937. Erik didn’t want to talk, except to tell her one thing: “It was better under the czars.”

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/switching-the-code-for-social-harmony?

Last week, BBC Radio Four broadcast a programme about “code-switching”.

This term started life in linguistics, where it means alternating between two or more languages during a conversation. 

Now, though, it’s become a weapon on the identity politics battleground. Black culture warriors complain they feel under pressure to “code-switch” in order to conform to white society in language, tone, dress, body language and behaviour.

The BBC programme was presented by Lucrece Grehoua, who was born in Britain but whose parents came from Ivory Coast. She claimed that she and other black people were required to “code-switch” in order to be accepted into middle-class white culture with which, she claimed, they had little in common.

Really? Precisely which bit of this culture was alien to her? The middle-class bit, or the white bit?  Come to that, what exactly is “white culture”? Or is it just that white people are allegedly all middle-class, or all middle-class people are allegedly white? 

Anyway, poor Grehoua had been forced to undertake an “unending journey into poshness, pronouncing all my words in a different way” and adopting a “high-pitched voice” to sound more “accommodating”.  

It wasn’t possible, she said, to be “black and direct”. People like her had to shed their “Multicultural London English”, known as MLE, which featured neologisms such as “innit” instead of “isn’t it”. This effort was, apparently, exhausting.

I listened to all this astounded. Quite apart from the anti-white racism and risible equation of “white” and “middle-class”, she was racialising and anathematising something that just about everyone does at one time or another.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/30/cultural-suicide-is-painless/

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.

In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed

We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

A friend recently sent an e-mail in which he pointed out that Apple had installed, without my knowledge, a COVID-19 sensor app on my iPhone. The app notifies me if I’ve been near someone that has been reported as having COVID-19. My iPhone already knows where I am. Now it will know with whom I meet and speak. How soon before it knows if I am with a Communist, a neo-Nazi or a supporter of Trump?  At five months shy of eighty, the old man in me says it is good for my phone to know where I am. On the other hand, the libertarian in me says, whoa! Do I really want to live in a society where government, or some organization, tracks my every move and knows with whom I associate?

We live in an extraordinary time, where advances in technology outpace our ability to understand their consequences. Absent a return to a new Dark Age, technological advances will persist. It is the potential to manipulate thoughts and actions that should concern us. “Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically. The system suppresses individual initiative, and the 21st Century is all about individualism and freedom. The development of technology supported those directions.” So spoke Lech Walesa in a 2002 interview with Julia Scheeres in a June 2002 interview for Wired. Eighteen years later, technology has advanced beyond what most people thought possible twenty years ago. Today, our every movements can be monitored. Individual freedom has bowed to the happiness of security and the collective promise of Socialism. Over seventy years ago, George Orwell saw this coming: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

Dystopian novels, from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, George Orwell’s 1984, to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have shown how a repressive society can be propagandized a utopian future. It is the promise of Socialism, Communism and Nazism, where ends justify means. In words that provide an eerie precursor to the cancel culture that led to the New York Times 1619 Project, George Orwell, in 1949, wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16430/overthrow-america

The situation had become “worrying,” in fact, even before the results of the 2016 presidential election were known. As we now can read in the Department of Justice report by Michael Horowitz, the senior levels of government during the Obama Administration were colluding to prevent President Trump from winning the election, and then, after it, to frame him in an attempted coup d’état.

Mayors of many cities and other local officials have deliberately protected criminals over law-abiding citizens and allowed the destruction to take place.

“I thought things were partisan and tough 30 years ago — nothing compared to today. Things have fundamentally changed… [the left] represents a revolutionary Rousseauian party that believes in tearing down the system… They’re interested in complete political victory. They’re not interested in compromise. They’re not interested in dialectic, exchange of views… It’s a substitute religion. They view their political opponents… as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they’re trying to reach…” — US Attorney General William Barr, Fox News, August 9, 2020.

“Today our nation is facing the most serious threat to establish such a tyranny in our entire history.” — David Horowitz, Frontpage Mag, August 10, 2020.

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020 might appear, looking back, as a pretext for mayhem. His killing by a white police officer was immediately followed by a wave of riots during which neighborhoods in several major cities were devastated. Stores were looted, buildings were burned and people were murdered as mayors and other local public officials chose to let the rioters run wild, whip up racial conflict and protect the criminals rather than the citizens being brutalized. The riots quickly appeared to have nothing to do with Floyd’s death and everything to do with groups seeking to overthrow America.

https://rightwaypundit.com/ny-creates-special-rules-for-the-rich-and-famous-but-anyone-else-gets-sent-to-jail/

As you likely know, the looked forward to MTV Video Music Awards ceremony is coming up rather soon. The event, scheduled for Sunday, is said to be bringing the best of best from the music industry into the Big Apple.

However, as also know, the state of New York, and New York City included, is under strict quarantine orders from Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. Per the order and the New York State Department of Health, anyone entering the state from one of just about 30 states which currently appear on a travel advisory list must self-quarantine for a minimum of 14 days. If you do not, you could be charged with up to 15 days in jail and or a fine of up to $10,000.

Given the order and the strictness with which it has been carried out thus far, many have asked if the VMAs will be held virtually this year, as the Country Music Awards were.

The answer is frank no.

The VMAs will continue as planned in NYC, with all sorts of stars coming in to perform. Oh, and of course, none of those stars will be required to self-quarantine.

Yep, you read that right. Stars like Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and many more will be crossing the threshold into New York, coming from states like California – which is most certainly on the travel advisory list – and be allowed to carry on as usual.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-evening-stroll-with-black-lives-matter-11598655533?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Democrats seem to be figuring out that they made a political blunder by failing to condemn urban violence at their virtual convention last week. Then came the riots in Kenosha, Wis., in Minneapolis again, and elsewhere, and Joe Biden finally criticized the violence and looting in a video on Wednesday.

He may have to do more after the GOP convention drew a sharp line between peaceful protest and violence. And he may have to go even further than that after the video scenes of harassment on the streets of Washington, D.C., that went viral on Thursday night and Friday.

Black Lives Matter protesters outside the White House cursed and threatened people walking to their hotels after they attended the President’s nomination acceptance speech on the South Lawn. One man with gray hair was sucker-punched and fell to the ground. A middle-aged couple was cursed for blocks by a woman wearing a mask covering her head and a crowd that jostled and threatened them.

Florida Rep. Brian Mast, who walks slowly with prosthetic legs, was surrounded and screamed at again and again to answer, “What do you feel about police killing black people?” When he calmly replied that killing anyone is wrong and everyone deserves due process, they screamed at him more loudly. Mr. Mast lost his legs while serving with special forces in Afghanistan as a bomb disposal expert.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/new_yorks_big_brother_has_gone_bananas.html

In reading the New York State travel advisory, I am reminded of one of my favorite scenes from a Woody Allen movie, this one from Bananas.  Having ascended to power, the dictatorial rebel leader Esposito announces his new rules for San Marcos:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. … In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now…16 years old!

Woody’s character Fielding Mellish cracks, “What’s the Spanish word for straitjacket?”  The Spanish word is camisa de fuerza.  The Swedish word is tvångströja.  In any language, Gov. Andrew Cuomo surely needs one.  It is bad enough that he is running the state by executive order.  Worse is that the orders are nuts.  If Woody Allen were to make a comic version of 1984, he could model “Big Brother” on Andrew Cuomo.

Last week, I flew into Buffalo.  It was my first flight this year into New York, a state in which I have owned a summer cottage for the last 30 years.  Coming from Missouri, a state on New York’s travel advisory, I had to fill out a two-sided form promising that I would quarantine in place for 14 days.  As if.

Missouri has had about 25 COVID-19 deaths per 100,00 people.  New York has had about 165.  In the western part of Missouri where I live, the rate is considerably lower.  No matter.  By some perverse calculation, my return to New York threatened to put the state’s residents at some elevated risk.

To visit my own cottage, I had to promise not to be in public or otherwise leave the quarters that they have identified as “suitable.”  These “quarters” — how quaint — had to have “separate bathroom facilities for each individual or family group.”  More than that, I had to have “access to a sink with soap and water, and paper towels.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/28/the-fatal-attraction-of-faction/

So far, 2020 has been a dystopian nightmare from George Washington’s perspective. He was once “first in war, first in peace, and first in the minds of his countrymen,” as Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee eulogized him. But now statues of Washington are being toppled, damaged and defaced.

Our first president, who paid careful attention to setting precedents that might allow America not to only survive, but to “live long and prosper,” would find such acts nearly a mirror image of his hopes for what could make our experiment in liberty last. How do we know? Just look at his emphatic warnings to do everything possible to avoid the violence of faction in his 1796 farewell address in contrast to the violence of faction that has played out on our city streets.  

Washington offered “sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.” In particular, he insisted that we keep “indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.”

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence … is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other[s]. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.