RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://carolineglick.com/john-boltons-temper-tantrum/

Former US national security adviser John Bolton’s critics routinely refer to him as a neoconservative. But they are wrong. Bolton was never part of the neoconservative clique of Bush administration officials.

Neoconservatives are messianists and American imperialism is their replacement theology.

Neoconservatives view America as the Promised Land and Americans as the Chosen People. From their perspective, the Torah was superseded by the Declaration of Independence. The Torah will not go forth from Zion, but from Washington, and the world will reach a redemptive state – what Jews refer to as “Tikkun Olam” not when the nations of the world accept God’s reign, but when the American empire brings democracy to all corners of the world.

Bolton, like President Donald Trump, disdains messianism. Like President Trump, his view of foreign policy is cut and dry. America is the good guy. It has enemies and allies. It is supposed to be good to its allies and bad to its enemies so that the people will want to be its allies and won’t want to be its enemies.

When Bolton ran a quixotic campaign in the Republican presidential primaries in 2012, many of his supporters hoped that at a minimum his run would help to position him as the Republican Party’s national security standard-bearer. And when President Trump appointed Bolton to serve as his national security adviser in 2018, many were certain that working together, the two men would take America’s superpower stature to new heights.

Alas, the two men’s common sense of the general thrust of US national security policy did not translate into a good working relationship. And truth be told, the person most responsible for their inability to work together was Bolton, not Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/21/what-happens-when-the-madness-ends/

When something cannot go on, it certainly will not go on. But what are the symptoms of what cannot go on and when? 

There are two historic red lines and our revolution is getting close to both. 

When Normal People Grow Weary 

One is when “average” people, both white and nonwhite, who identify neither with Left nor Right, woke nor unwoke, become frightened or appalled by the violence and the anarchy—and thus finally move to dismantle the guillotine as the razor increasingly starts haircutting friends, idols, and compatriots. 

Their verdict can be known either by demonstrating themselves, boycotting, voting, or massive civil disobedience. At some point, tonight’s hero on YouTube torching Wendy’s or kicking a downed policeman on CNN, becomes tomorrow’s commonplace, unnoticed felon—with a new warrant issued out on his head, and about whose fate and lengthy CV no one other than his parents much cares.

Governors and mayors can demand masks and all sorts of social distancing measures. But once they declared that only those not demonstrating—the non-looting and nonviolent—were subject to their rules, while millions both peacefully protesting and violently looting were exempt, then their words meant nothing. It will be impossible for them ever to be seen as credible again. Virus or no virus, crowded freeways, and busy malls will soon be referenda on the bond of governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. 

In a few weeks, we are promised that multimillionaire NFL players and coaches in unison will not deign to stand up for the National Anthem. Promises, promises. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/nazi-us-comparisons-moral-obscenity-jay-bergman/

Comparisons of the United States and Nazi Germany have a long pedigree, from the “fascist” New Deal in the 1930s to “(George W.) Bush-Hitler” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

More recently, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, claimed in The Atlantic that, in their “apocalyptic thinking,” U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and other members of President Trump’s administration are contemporary equivalents of the Nazi collaborators in charge of Vichy France, the puppet regime the Nazis established during World War II that assisted in the Holocaust, and some of whose leaders later were executed as traitors.

Now, revived by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the comparison again is in the public domain.

But any analogy or comparison between the Nazi and American systems is invalid. A factual basis for it does not exist.

This certainly is true for the Floyd killing itself. By no rational standard of comparison can the actions of the Minneapolis police officers be characterized, as they recently were by Central Connecticut State University professor Aram Ayalon, as “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.” Nor can the indignation these same actions induced in Rep. Eric Swallwell, D-Calif., justify Swallwell’s subsequent description of Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany in the Trump administration, as “Goebbels with a Twitter account.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-agents-and-instruments-of-decadence/

“Given the academic poison that has permeated and rotted so much in schools and universities in recent years, the waves of protesters parading their ignorance on our streets as hard-core revolutionaries smash windows and defile statues is no surprise. Far more shocking would be the existence of elected officials prepared to cry ‘Enough!'”

Right now, all around the world, people’s lives and livelihoods continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are young and healthy, the Wuhan flu’s impact is generally mild and recovery almost certain, the casualty numbers confirming it is the elderly and those already suffering from other medical conditions for whom it is a deadly threat. It is, however, highly contagious, and it is this characteristic, together with the modern revolution in globe-girdling travel, that has led to its rapid spread around the world — a spread driven first through Chinese deceit abetted by World Health Organisation’s connivance and subsequently boosted by incompetently administered, or non-existent, national border controls.

Recent events have brought to light another contagion, this one let loose by the killing of George Floyd  beneath the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25. It spread rapidly — virally, as they say — around the world, thanks to the internet and revolution in communications.  That the circumstances in Minneapolis don’t necessarily apply elsewhere remains of no account. Facts don’t matter. Floyd’s death has been a pretext, the stated concern largely fraudulent, for blacks murdered by other blacks are of little concern and whites killed by blacks not worth mentioning at all.  The demonstrators believe social distancing rules are for others, not themselves.

Apart from the enjoyment of looting and destruction, what those in the rampaging crowds who actually have a serious social intent are really campaigning for is the destruction of Western civilisation, which they regard as primarily responsible for every evil known to man – racism, oppression, exploitation, misogyny, sexism, slavery, ‘catastrophic’ climate change. The list is endless. They believe that only by destruction  can  a new era of peace and enlightenment come about. Taking their cues from the French and Cambodian revolutions, they seek a societal re-set, starting from a new Year Zero.  Monuments must be destroyed, places and institutions renamed, books burned, films and TV programmes banned, historical figures forever condemned, history itself rewritten, anyone not fully with the programme “de-platformed” and a new power structure implemented.  It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 in which the  all-powerful Party understands that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The rioters are not just ignorant vandals; they are following an ideology, a venomous cult every bit as insane as that promoted by Mao Zedong which led to the trashing of Chinese history and culture by the Red Guards in 1966. In contrast to COVID-19, this contagion most seriously afflicts the young rather than the old and experienced.  It is a virus of the mind.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/20/joe-biden-and-friedrich-nietzsche/

According to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.”

Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in the state were free—Texas being that last state to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the date that the latest Kwanzaa-like manufactured racialist holiday, “Juneteenth,” is intended to celebrate and that Joe’s minders intended to capitalize on by writing “Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America’s Long-Fought Fight For Justice.” 

The institution of slavery, which ended nearly 150 years ago, has no bearing—zero—on the plight of American blacks today. What does affect them, mightily, is the destruction of the black family, a project brought to us by more than five decades of Democratic welfare policy. 

The PR surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program told the world that its aim was to abolish poverty. It’s actual effect was to institutionalize poverty and promulgate an endless agenda of dependency, which all but guaranteed black subservience to the governmental overlord. It also institutionalized the gigantic network of government workers charged with servicing—and, by extension, perpetuating—the welfare state. The metabolism of this establishment was expertly anatomized by Christopher Caldwell in his latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It makes for a mournful story. 

The New Iconoclasm

Also mournful is the spectacle of violence and destructive iconoclasm sweeping the country in the wake of the death of the career criminal George Floyd while in police custody. 

For the last few of weeks, we’ve seen stores looted, police stations and police cars torched, and all manner of public monuments defaced or destroyed. As we know from (in the words of Laplace) expériences nombreuses et funestes, it is one thing to start a revolution, quite another to bring it to an end. Those gleefully riding the tiger at the beginning often wind up inside it before the journey comes to an end. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/on_capitalizing_black_but_not_white.html

As we descend farther into more racial balkanization, it is noteworthy to point out that in 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ushered in a discussion about how to capitalize the words “white” and “black” when referring to groups of people.  Back then, they stated:

Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities.  There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.

To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.

In fact, according to the Newsweek article that the CJR cites, “[w]hat many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality.  Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.  There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics.  Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.  These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest.  Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16134/cocktail-of-grievances

[The United States] is something of an exception in being the only major nation-state to have struggled with and, as time went by, against, racism…. The War of Secession, successive civil rights movements, the fight against segregation and methods such as positive discrimination tell the story of a nation seeking to move away from racism.

Slavery was a routine part of human existence from the start, and in some lands still is. Nor were black Africans the only human beings to become slaves…. In Persian and Ottoman Empires, slaves came from the Caucasus, Scandinavia, and what is now Russia. Again, no black Africans were involved…. Slavery was a common disease that affected every community on earth; a shameful secret of the whole human family.

As the outrage inspired by the death of George Floyd in a botched arrest operation calms down, it may be time to consider what has been achieved by the anger it unleashed in dozens of cities across the world.

Sadly, I fear, not only that much of that anger was wasted but that it may have contributed to deeper communitarian ressentiments.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16118/western-history-culture-stand-up

“We are afraid that anything we do is colonial. There’s plenty of countries willing to step into that global governance gap: China, Iran, Russia, Turkey”. — Bruce Gilley, The Times, May 10, 2018.

British post-colonial guilt is, however, having repercussions far larger than statues. There is, for instance, still total silence about persecuted Christians, according to a UK bishop leading a government review into their suffering.

Western history is seemingly being remade to portray all of Western civilization as just one big apartheid. It is as if we should not only pull down statues but also pull down ourselves. A successful democracy, however, cannot be built on just erasing the past.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right”. — George Orwell, 1984.

What is this macabre ideological game aimed at accomplishing?… It is a power-grab to create a cultural revolution, to prevent anyone from saying that cultures are not all the same; to put Europe’s past on trial; to instill perennial remorse into consciences, and to spread intellectual terror to advance multiculturalism.

“Antiracism is no longer the defense of the equal dignity of people, but an ideology, a vision of the world,” said the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, son of Holocaust survivors.

“Antiracism has been transformed… At the time of the great migration, it is no longer a question of welcoming newcomers by integrating them into European civilization, but exposing the faults of this civilization”.

He referred to “self-racism” as “the most dismaying and grotesque pathology of our time”.

Its capital is London.

“Topple the racists” consists of a map with 60 statues in 30 British cities. The removal of the statues is being requested to support a movement born in the United States after a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, killed a black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/an_uncivil_war.html

Left-wing thinking effectively blanks out the real distinctions between representative government and totalitarian dictatorship.

–       Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

There is a growing consensus among conservative writers and many individual citizens that America has descended into a condition of virtual civil war. It is not, or not yet, characterized by military confrontations on a national scale, as in 1861-65, but the facts on the ground strongly suggest a breakdown of civil order:

·       the irreconcilable conflict between the political left and right;

·       the belligerence and vituperation that passes for a national “conversation”;

·       sporadic acts of violence, flash mobs and organized riots erupting in every corner of the country;

·       the dismal lack of local and state leadership;

·       Orwellian Ministries of Truth, otherwise known as digital platforms, controlling and censoring information;

·       a rabid feminist network intent on destabilizing cultural traditions and mores;

·       a president betrayed by his own generals and party senators;

·       a rogue enclave set up by malcontents and domestic terrorists in the middle of an American city;

·       and racial mayhem fomented and exploited by a class of partisan criminals.

Whether or not we call this situation the preliminary stages of civil war or simply massive social unrest and cutthroat politics may be only a matter of terminology.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2020/06/19/the-silent-majority-can-be-silent-no-more-n551984

Lately, it seems that we conservatives can’t win even when we’re winning. But the country is under siege, so we cannot indulge in the luxury of being discouraged.

This year has been one body blow after another to the nation we love. First, there was the coronavirus, and we thought, “How can this get any worse?” Then came the economic shutdown and the incalculable pain and suffering it brought. Next were the riots, the radicals’ unopposed seizure of a section of Seattle, and the maniacal efforts throughout the country to defund the police. Now a series of rulings from the “conservative” Supreme Court is wreaking untold havoc on the Constitution and the rule of law.

It wouldn’t take a Christian fanatic or an excitable conspiracist to conclude that America is now the target of an intense spiritual onslaught — brought on by its own rampant descent into decadence.

The left has been at war with America as founded for decades, and it has made great progress in transforming our culture and institutions. Leftists are activism-oriented and relentless. They pursue their goals 24/7, exhausting their less activist and less calculating opponents, and advance their agenda by sheer attrition.

But a more important factor in the left’s success is the depressing naivete of too many conservatives about its ultimate aims. If you underestimate the extremism and determination of your opponents, how can you counter them?

Perhaps one silver lining emerging from the Democrats’ enabling of the proliferating lawlessness in America is that unsuspecting patriots are finally awakening to the horrors facing us and the left’s cynical exploitation of them.