RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/woke-protesters-historys-ingredients-riot-revolution/#slide-1

History’s ingredients of riot and revolution

A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said “all lives matter.” In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics.

She won a huge audience, as she intended. But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn’t want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn’t like.

This wouldn’t have been much of a story. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — one that showed her weeping in a near-fetal position.

She fought back tears while complaining about how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social-media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.

The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it. What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting, the threats, and the screaming in the face of police is the schizophrenic behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.

On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their own careers on the Internet pose as vicious Maoists — the hard-core shock troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs, and spray paint.

In homage to Italy’s Blackshirts of the past, they wear black hoodies, don makeshift helmets, and strap on ad hoc protective padding — part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.

www.swtotd.blogspot.c

“Patriotism,” said Samuel Johnson in 1775, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” A little more than a hundred years later, Oscar Wilde wrote, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” In 1906, Ambrose Bierce published The Devils Dictionary. In it he accused Samuel Johnson of being too gentle; Bierce defined patriotism as “the first resort of the scoundrel.”  From Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken, wits have had great fun belittling patriots and patriotism.

Patriotism is a positive force. In a cynical age, patriotism appears dated; it is out of sync with progressive beliefs. But true patriotism is deeply embedded. It accepts and withstands criticism. In Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin wrote: “I love America more than any other country in this world and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That is as it should be – the right to criticize is implicit in free speech. Patriotism is devotion and attachment to one’s homeland and fellow citizens; it does not mean total obeisance, as is required by those from Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Patriotism should not be confused with nationalism, which is divisive, intolerant and nihilistic. In a multiracial and multicultural country, patriotism is what binds a disparate people. Patriotism is inclusive and feeds on love, while nationalism is partisan and is nourished by hate.

Patriotism was the theme of President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3rd. That was as it should be, as the United States celebrated its 244th birthday. If one were to read only the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, or the start of Associated Press’ Jill Colvin’s postmortem, “After a weekend spent stoking division, President Donald Trump…”, one would conclude that Mr. Trump’s speech in South Dakota was dark and divisive. However, if one read it, without knowledge of the speaker, it would appear uplifting and optimistic.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/08/big-philanthropy-and-the-battle-against-systemic-racism/

The millennialist mindset of Big Philanthropy and its fellow travelers leaves one susceptible to any world-saving scheme that comes down the pike.

Who would have thought the Gates Foundation would endorse tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and other dead white men?

Sure, you won’t find “mob violence,” “vandalism,” or “destruction of public property” in any grant applications, but the paroxysms of rage racking our country and the desire to rip racism from America by root and branch is the end-product of Big Philanthropy’s governing ideology.

To understand why, you have to know the difference between charity and philanthropy.

When a charity sees a hungry widow and her toddler daughter, it buys food and gives it to them. Save-a-Soul Mission would offer a sermon with the soup but that was pretty much the end of it.

When a philanthropy sees a hungry widow and child, it pays 1,800 overeducated, post-graduate credentialed, deracinated, privileged children of the elites to study crop yields, food distribution patterns, income inequality, demographic trends, and to design and implement a comprehensive 600-page program using the most sophisticated computer models to predict what will absolutely, certainly, definitively eliminate poverty. In the meantime, it will place the widow’s child with foster parents of better means and provide a micro loan to develop the mother’s entrepreneurial superpower.

Where charity seeks to feed the hungry, scientific philanthropy seeks to eliminate the causes of hunger. The charitable impulse says if you save one person you have saved the world. The philanthropic impulse says system-wide change will be the salvation of humanity.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/09/companies-must-answer-for-their-support-of-the-radical-black-lives-matter-org/

“There are plenty of organizations working to help blacks and other minorities succeed in this country but aren’t bent on turning the U.S. into a socialist hellhole. Corporate executives should take the time to learn about them.”

Several companies have been bragging recently that they’re providing financial support to the official Black Lives Matter organization to burnish their PR image. No doubt they’re getting Woke points for doing so. But do the executives at those companies have any idea how radical this group is and what it’s trying to achieve?

The Daily Signal reported earlier this week that at least 18 corporations have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

The list includes: DoorDash, Deckers, Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, Glossier, 23andMe, AirBnB, Unilever, Bungie, Nabisco, Dropbox, Fitbit, Developer Digital, Skillshare, Square Enix, The Game Co., and Tinder.

The Daily Signal notes that other companies said they were giving to Black Lives Matter, but didn’t specifically say it was to the foundation.

Private companies are free to give their money to whomever they want. But you’d think that the executives at these corporations would have done the least bit of due diligence before forking over the funds.

So, here are some questions for these companies, and any others that are giving money or encouraging donations to the BLM foundation.

Do your shareholders and employees know that their company is supporting a group run by “trained Marxists”?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/08/america-needs-to-stop-reacting-to-coronavirus-like-a-bunch-of-hysterics/

Americans are learning how to cope with the virus in a common-sense way. That doesn’t mean being reckless, but neither does it mean cowering inside every day of every week and every month unless a vaccine shows up.

Harvard University recently announced that it will ban students from in-person classes for the entirety of the next academic year. The decision, not based on science, is typical of the decisions made by many elites in response to the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe.

Global pandemics aren’t new, but the way many Americans are responding to this one is. Americans have been blessed to experience few pandemics in recent decades. The swine flu of 2009 was no fun, as my husband can attest, but it resulted in only 273,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the United States. The Wuhan virus hospitalizations and deaths have eclipsed those numbers many times over.

But from 1918 to 1968, pandemics, deadly flus, and horrific childhood diseases were much more common. When the Asian flu hit the United States in 1957, during the Eisenhower administration, it was just the latest contagion college students had faced in a lifetime of contagious diseases. The 1957 Asian flu killed 116,000 Americans at a time the U.S. population was 172 million, just more than half the current population. That would be the equivalent of 222,000 Americans today. By comparison, the coronavirus has killed 133,000 Americans thus far.

By the time the Asian flu came along in 1957, many college students had already battled measles, mumps, chicken pox, German measles, and polio. For many years, there were no vaccines for these things. The parents of these college students had battled diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and the Spanish flu that killed 675,000 Americans and more than 50 million across the world. In today’s terms, that would be the equivalent of more than 1.6 million Americans dying from coronavirus.

There were brief, localized school closures in 1957 but the epidemic barely formed a blip in the American consciousness. It didn’t even elicit much of a mention in major Eisenhower biographies. Even the horrific Spanish flu was not a major media event. There is no historic record of President Woodrow Wilson even publicly mentioning the flu, which killed more than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population.

The 1968 Hong Kong flu was also bad, killing about 100,000 Americans when the population was just 60 percent of what it is now.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/08/an-open-letter-on-canceling-cancel-culture-from-the-greatest-living-american-writer/
For those of you unfamiliar with cancel culture, it’s speech that speaks out against other speech that may be speaking speakings that other speakers find offensive.

The organizers of the recent Harper’s Magazine letter against cancel culture didn’t ask me to participate in their project, despite the fact that my Uncle, T. Gore Pollack III, was that magazine’s founding editor. They neglected to include me because they’re afraid of my ideas. Also, I’ve either divorced, broken up with, or participated in a conscious friendship uncoupling with at least a dozen of the signatories. Such is the price of profligacy and greatness.

Nevertheless, as the leading American thinker of my time, or any time, I feel a burning erotic need to speak out against cancel culture right now. For those of you unfamiliar with cancel culture, it’s speech that speaks out against other speech that may be speaking speakings that other speakers find offensive. Though I’m as immune to cancellation as I am to COVID-19, I’ve still felt the hot breath of the culture on my neck in recent years.

The Internet has met certain recent ideas of mine, such as the fact that Black men are actually white women, The Virus Is From Space, and Tom Brady is a TERF denier, with a fury usually reserved for people who are less handsome than I am. Emily Wallace-Wells, a staff writer from Voxios, released a three-paragraph statement that said my words decrying the desecration of the Dr. Seuss sculpture garden in Springfield, Massachusetts, made her feel “unsafe”, despite the fact that I’ve never met her and also the fact that she doesn’t actually exist. These are the sorts of nightmares that cancel culture has created.

https://mailchi.mp/peaceandtolerance/when-did-the-left-first-go-woke-when-they-betrayed-black-slaves?e=c4e6370125

On this very day in 1997, Dr. Charles Jacobs, then the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, an organization at the forefront of the war against modern-day black slavery in Africa, published a biting op-ed in The Boston Globe: “Where are the liberals?”

Back then, the world was slowly coming to grips with a stinging fact: that Arabs and Muslims own black men, women, and children as chattel property in Mauritania and Sudan — today.

The problem, however, was that all of the activist and media elements which one would think would jump to free modern-day black slaves — including the anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s — simply weren’t there. Even worse, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — the people who had produced the original reports of slavery which alerted Dr. Jacobs and others to its horrors — simply refused to help.

Furthermore, so-called black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, world-famous figures with massive community and media clout, either directly rebuffed efforts to help tell the world, or backed off at the behest of actively hostile parties such as Louis Farrakhan (who preferred to blame the Jews).

Though a few brave and decent people in the mainstream media, such as at Dateline NBC and even The New York Times, did do their part in broadcasting the images and accounts of slavery, such instances of righteousness were few and far between — and today, are just about extinct.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16197/daniel-pipes-conversation

“Trump came to office with minimal knowledge of the outside world, just impressions and emotions. He also lacked a philosophy or a network…. Fortunately, some of Trump’s instincts are solid, for example, as concerns China, Iran, Israel, and Venezuela, and he does not get intimidated by the Establishment consensus.” — Daniel Pipes.

“Antisemitism long ago moved in the main from the Right to the Left; Jeremy Corbyn has no conservative counterpart. These days, mainstream conservative parties are more philosemitic than antisemitic. Leftists keep trying to turn conservatives like Victor Orbán into antisemites but that is silly.” — Daniel Pipes.

“But that improvement [of the position of Christians and Jews in the Muslim world] lasted only so long as the Europeans remained. When they left, the status of Jews and Christians fell far below what it had traditionally been. About 95% of Jews that lived in Muslim-majority countries have already fled; Christians are not far behind.” — Daniel Pipes.

Daniel Pipes is an American historian and president of the Middle East Forum. His writing focuses on Islamism, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. His archive is at www.DanielPipes.org

Canlorbe: Do you expect the George Floyd protests to leave, in the American collective memory, a mark comparable to the September 11 attacks and the Vietnam War?

Pipes: The great question is: Will the current lurch to the left be temporary or permanent? I worry it is permanent because liberals are capitulating to progressives as never before. Will that trend continue or end? It is hard to forecast when very much in the moment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/a_time_for_choosing.html

In 1964, Ronald Reagan burst upon the national political scene with his consequential speech about America’s worrisome move away from traditional American governance that focuses on the individual and reveres traditional morality. Americans nevertheless elected a Democrat who believed that smart government could right all wrongs.

That choice set America on the path to the 2020 election. This time, the choice is no longer between bigger or smaller government. Instead, Americans must choose between individual liberty under the Constitution or full-bore, totalitarian Marxism.

We chose wrong in 1964 but America’s inherent strength gave us a 46-year grace period. This time, however, we’d better get it right for there are no do-overs.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/06/the-great-fireworks-rebellion-of-2020/

It could be that the Fireworks Rebellion of 2020 was the shot heard ‘round the country that signaled the defenders of America are paying attention—and unwilling to tolerate much more.

If Donald Trump’s Independence Eve address at Mount Rushmore was a battle cry for the republic, millions of Americans seemingly joined forces with the president the next evening with their own sort of ammunition: fireworks.

Lockdown orders and “social distancing” decrees canceled official Fourth of July fireworks displays across the country—the latest in a long list of cruelties inflicted on the public to suffocate freedom and joy—but fed-up patriots from sea to shining sea were having none of it. 

Families and friends gathered in defiance of government bans on well-attended gatherings to celebrate our nation’s founding. Then, as the sun set, Americans lit up the skies with red, white, and blue bursts of pride in a not-so-subtle rebuke of leftist mobs intent on destroying our nation’s past, present, and future.

A news helicopter in Los Angeles captured one spectacular sight. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of pyrotechnics exploded above the city’s skyline in a loud, colorful middle finger to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who had closed public beaches and prohibited the use of fireworks as well as instructed his 4 million constituents not to congregate with anyone outside of their household in the futile fight to “stop” the spread of coronavirus. Angelenos responded by launching an “overwhelming” number, one reporter observed, of contraband fireworks; residents were warned not to call 911 to report the illegal celebrations because police couldn’t keep up.

Americans across the country acted similarly as social media accounts noted an uptick in fireworks activity from previous years.