RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/8943/bombs-a-weighed

Me yesterday:

I shall hold off further comment until more facts are known.

No such circumspection stayed Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney, who reacted instantly to the “suspicious packages” mailed to the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, CNN and others, and weighed in with boundless confidence:

Hate acts follow hate speech. It is past time for us to turn down and tune out the rabid rhetoric.

This is a nitwit statement even by Mitt’s recent standards, and doubtless a preview of the role he intends to play in the Senate. It is also an object lesson in the perils of Tweet-speed insight. “Moderate” “reasonable” “centrists”, like all other politicians, should take a deep breath and be mindful of the old adage: Don’t just say something, stand there.

“Hate speech” is not a notion a supposedly “severe conservative” (as Mitt once styled himself) would sign on to. “Hate speech” is free speech – because the concept of free speech exists for the speech you hate. In the modern world, “hate speech” is the enforcement arm of identity politics: Once an approved victim group is designated – Muslims, transgenders – “hate speech” is a pseudo-legal concept for shutting people up: Unpersuaded by the benefits of mass Muslim immigration? Concerned that seven-year-olds should not be hustled into “transitioning”? Hate speech, hate speech, hate speech…

Until you reach the stage that most of the western world is at – where polite society has ruled anything worth talking about out of bounds. At which point the masses turn to impolite society – Trump, Brexiteers, Salvini, Orbán…

Is it true that “hate acts follow hate speech”? To lazy types like, alas, “severely conservative” Republican Senate candidates, the logic is self-evident. As I wrote almost a decade ago:

Ever since this magazine attracted the attention of Canada’s “human rights” regime, defenders of the system have clung to a familiar argument. In a letter to Maclean’s, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., Canada’s chief censor, put it this way:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271720/anniversary-shameful-us-surrender%E2%80%94-cuban-missile-humberto-fontova

Those who think “Fake News” started with Trump’s term and the media’s “slobbering love affair” with a U.S. president started during Obama’s should have seen John F. Kennedy’s term.

Imagine Obama’s term with no Fox News, internet or talk radio. That’s about what JFK enjoyed. And tragically, the fairy tales Kennedy’s court scribes (with their media cohorts of the time) concocted about JFK’s Pattonesque handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis prevail in media/academic circles even today.

In fact, that Khrushchev swept the floor with cowed Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.

“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”

“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. “Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard.”

Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.

“The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/papadopoulos-told-fbi-informant-in-2016-there-was-no-russian-collusion-in-trump-campaign/

For months, Republicans have been claiming that classified documents revealed exculpatory evidence that should have been included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Carter Page — and now The Hill’s John Solomon has the scoop.

In mid-September of 2016, weeks after the Russia counterintelligence probe was launched, then-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos told an FBI informant there was no collusion going on between the campaign and Russia that he knew of, and that such activity would be “treasonous.”

Papadopoulos told Solomon that he made the comments to London-based professor and FBI informant Stefan Halper.

“He was there to probe me on the behest of somebody else,” Papadopoulos said. “He said something along the lines of, ‘Oh, it’s great that Russia is helping you and your campaign, right George?’”

Papadopoulos said Halper also suggested the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails that summer. “I think I told him something along the lines of, ‘I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. What you are talking about is treason. And I have nothing to do with that, so stop bothering me about it,’” Papadopoulos recalled.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271728/senator-hirono-trumps-opposition-caravan-anti-daniel-greenfield

I may be misinterpreting her.

But when you spew an incoherent word salad of random talking points, that’s inevitable.

There are a lot of crazy House members. But there’s usually less competition for craziest senator. These days it’s a cage match between Senator Cory Booker, who isn’t really crazy, just a bad actor, and Senator Mazie Hirono, who seems to only have a casual relationship with her brain.

You can speculate whether she means that Trump is anti-Semitic because opposing an illegal alien caravan of MS-13 gang members is anti-Semitic, or because nationalism is, or because speculating about middle eastern migrants is, or because she doesn’t know what anti-Semitic means.

My money is on the latter.

The Democrats keep posing with Farrakhan, but can’t be bothered to learn what anti-Semitism means.

https://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/official-school-records-support-claims-that-rep-ilhan-omar-d-mn-married-her-brother/

Minnesota state Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-60B) currently leads the race to fill the federal House seat being vacated by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN). Immediately after being elected to her current seat in 2016, Omar faced allegations — soon backed by a remarkable amount of evidence — that she had married her own brother in 2009, and was still legally his wife. They officially divorced in December 2017.

The motivation for the marriage remains unclear. However, the totality of the evidence points to possible immigration fraud and student loan fraud.

Rep. Omar has stated that she did marry “British citizen” Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, though the allegation that he is her brother is “absurd and offensive.”

Below, exclusive new evidence — from official archived high school records and corroborating sources — strongly supports the claim that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is indeed her brother.

As this implicates Rep. Omar in multiple state and federal felonies, I have contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota to submit all other information uncovered during our investigation.

———————

According to official student enrollment records archived by St. Paul Public Schools and the state of Minnesota, an “Ahmed N. Elmi” was enrolled as a senior in the Class of 2003 at Arlington Senior High School in St. Paul, MN, from September 6, 2002, until June 10, 2003. He graduated and received a diploma.

The enrollment record states that “Ahmed N. Elmi” was born on April 4, 1985.

Both Ilhan Omar’s 2009 marriage documents and her 2017 divorce proceedings state that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was born on April 4, 1985. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-dont-like-trump-just-his-results-1540241748

There’s a school of thought that the economy is only a political issue when it’s bad and that prosperous times allow people the luxury of prioritizing other issues. That’s not the message in the latest poll from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News.

The consensus among professional economists is that this Friday’s third-quarter GDP report from the Commerce Department will show another strong period of growth in the U.S. economy after a blowout performance in the second quarter. Voters don’t seem to be taking it for granted. WSJ/NBC survey respondents call “the economy and jobs” the most important factor in deciding their votes in this year’s elections for the U.S. Congress. Since June, this issue has overtaken health care as the top concern for participants in the poll.

Could this mean that despite all the recent positive economic data, survey respondents actually think the economy is lousy? Not likely, because voters are giving high marks to the party that is currently in charge of the nation’s economic policy. When it comes to dealing with the economy, survey participants say that Republicans “would do a better job” than Democrats by a 15-point margin. This appears to be the largest Republican advantage recorded by this survey, which has been asking the question since at least 1991.

This doesn’t mean that voters particularly like the nation’s chief economic policy maker. In fact 68% of respondents say they don’t like President Trump. But Mr. Trump appears to be setting a modern record in the share of the electorate saying that they don’t like the President personally, but approve of most of his policies. This category of voters currently stands at 20% of the electorate. For most recent Presidents such readings were generally in the low-to-mid single digits, though Bill Clinton’s share did climb into the teens.

The Journal reports that survey results show overall approval of President Trump is increasing, and so is enthusiasm among those in his party:

Hand in hand with Republicans’ increased election interest is a rise in Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating to 47%, the highest mark of his time in office, with 49% disapproving of his performance. That is an improvement from September, when 44% approved and 52% disapproved of his performance.

If a significant number of Americans are giving the President what might be called their grudging approval, you can’t say he’s not working hard to earn it. This is not a reference to his tweeting but to the results of two of his signature initiatives on economic policy.

This column has written at length about the encouraging spike in business investment following the December enactment of his tax cuts. Recently the Trump administration provided a progress report on the other pillar of his pro-growth agenda—reducing federal regulation. This is affectionately known as swamp-draining to those outside the D.C. metropolitan area.

It seems Team Trump is exceeding its own expectations. At one point the administration was aiming to cut about $10 billion in regulatory costs during the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Now the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reports the elimination of $23 billion in “overall regulatory costs across the government” during the fiscal year just ended. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/kavanaugh-identity-politics-white-supremacy

The current lawsuit challenging Harvard University’s use of racial preferences in admissions is about “white supremacy,” according to the school’s supporters. So, too, was the defense of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh against the charge of sexual assault, according to Kavanaugh’s critics. Never mind that the plaintiffs in the Harvard lawsuit are Asian-American students who were denied admission to the school despite academic qualifications superior to those of whites, and that Kavanaugh’s accuser was white herself. The roiling mass of resentments and one-upmanship that is identity politics is becoming ever more irrational in the Trump era. Whether a crack-up is imminent remains to be seen.

Harvard caps the number of Asians it admits, allege the plaintiffs—a coalition of Asian-American groups called Students for Fair Admissions—in the lawsuit against the university. As a result, Asian applicants must present higher academic qualifications than any other racial or ethnic group in order to be considered for admission. According to Harvard’s own data, test scores and a high school GPA that would give an Asian-American high school senior only a 25 percent chance of admission would provide a virtual admissions guarantee—95 percent—for an otherwise identical black applicant, a 77 percent chance of admission for a Hispanic student, and a 36 percent chance of admission for a white student. Asians would make up more than 50 percent of the admitted class if Harvard were colorblind, estimates Students for Fair Admissions, instead of the 18.6 percent Asian average maintained over recent years. The white student population would go down from 43 percent to 38 percent. Asians account for 6 percent of the national population; whites, 61 percent.

The Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit, in other words, seeks fairness for Asian-Americans, so that they can be rewarded, rather than penalized, for their academic accomplishments. Whites would lose out under a colorblind system. Yet Harvard’s defenders, including some Asian Harvard students, claim that the suit is really about shoring up white privilege. At a Defend Diversity rally held in Cambridge the day before the lawsuit began, demonstrators held signs reading “Asians Will Not Be Tools for Your White Supremacy.” A Harvard undergraduate who will testify for the defense used the identical language during the Defend Diversity rally: “I, along with so many other Asian-Americans, refuse to be tools of white supremacy.” At a pro-racial-preferences panel held at Harvard a week before the trial, the executive director of Boston’s Asian-American Resource Workshop argued that the “model minority myth is a creation of white supremacy.” An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson addressed to “fellow Asian-Americans” blamed the “structures of white supremacy” for portraying Asians as “smart and hardworking.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/russell-kirk-2018-political-impressions/

Remembering the words of this almost forgotten father of American conservatism.

Recently, I’ve been haunted by the memory of Russell Kirk. October 19 is the centenary of the author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953). The spectral metaphor fits Kirk, who died in 1994. He was as celebrated for his Gothic horror fiction as for his dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of columns on philosophy, history, academe, politics, and what he liked to call “humane letters.” He made some money from his ghost stories too, which helped Kirk and his wife Annette raise four daughters and host countless guests, students, and refugees at their home in rural Mecosta, Michigan. This almost forgotten father of American conservatism gave the movement a name and an intellectual ancestry. How would he respond to the world of 2018?

My guess is he wouldn’t like it. With his capes, cravats, three-piece suits, pocket-watches, and walking sticks, Kirk belonged more to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than to the twentieth. He was a man out of time. His friends included T.S. Eliot, Ray Bradbury, and Flannery O’Connor. His enemy was ideology — the attempt to reconstruct social order according to subjective, abstract, rationalist plans. His weapon in this battle was the “sword of imagination.” Infused with myth, poetry, history, and quotations from great works, Kirk’s prose was meant to elicit from his readers a sense of connection not only with other persons but also with generations past and generations to come. “My historical books, my polemical writings, my literary criticism, and even my fiction,” he wrote to his publisher Henry Regnery in 1987, “have been meant to resist the ideological passions that have been consuming civilization ever since 1914 — what Arnold Toynbee calls our ‘time of troubles.’”

He succeeded with this reader. I picked up The Conservative Mind as a college junior after coming across a reference to it in Jonah Goldberg’s G-File. Like many others over the last 60-odd years, I was taken by Kirk’s prose style and considerable learning. His interpretations of Edmund Burke and John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville inspired me, even as I was leery of his attitude toward John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun. Kirk’s reliance on tradition, prescription, and prudence sparked a heated argument with a close friend over the extent to which principle and natural right ought to inform our judgments of society. From Kirk I moved on to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), but got lost in its attack on William of Ockham, who died in 1347. The conservatism of Kirk and Weaver was rich and thought-provoking, but it didn’t strike me as particularly relevant to the foreign and domestic politics of the early twenty-first century. Only later would I hear David Brooks’s joke that you can tell what kind of conservative you are by how far back you would turn the clock.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/21/mob_rule_and_the_resistance.html

My friends and colleagues in the media, particularly at CNN, have taken offense to the idea that the self-styled “Resistance” to Donald Trump can ever be characterized as “a mob.”

It’s an unflattering description, but is it unfair? Are violence and physical intimidation now part of the Democrats’ playbook? To weigh that question, let’s do a thought experiment. The following actions all have taken place in the past two years. As you read about them, substitute the words “left” for “right,” “liberal” for “conservative,” and “Democrat” for “Republican.” As you do, consider how CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the mainstream media would cover these events if the labels were reversed:

January 21, 2017: Addressing the crowd at the Women’s March, featured speaker Madonna says she’s thought “an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” Actress Ashley Judd compares Trump to Hitler and those who attended his inauguration the day before to Nazis.

June 14, 2017: James T. Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old Democratic activist from Illinois shoots up a baseball diamond where Republican members of Congress are practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Apparently intending to kill several GOP House members, including Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who was grievously wounded, Hodgkinson had volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.”

October 28, 2017: At a parade in Annandale, Va., Wilfred Michael Stark III, 49, is arrested after trying to block the van carrying Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. Although Stark identifies himself as a journalist, he was there on behalf of a website run by Democratic Party activist David Brock, which Brock purchased for the stated goal of electing Hillary Clinton president.

November 3, 2017: Kentucky Republican Rand Paul is tackled from behind without warning by next-door neighbor Rene Boucher, breaking six of the senator’s ribs. The assailant claims he lost his temper because of an ongoing dispute the two men had about yard trimmings, but he was known by other neighbors as a partisan Democrat who attacked Republicans on social media. “May Robert Mueller fry Trump’s gonads,” he once posted.

A gay man who describes himself as a liberal Democrat is accusing New Jersey Senator Cory Booker of sexually assaulting him in 2014. Booker is considered a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

The man, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, penned a lengthy open letter which was posted on Twitter, describing the assault which occurred in a bathroom following a meeting at his workplace where the two met.

The letter goes into excruciating detail.

I stopped to use one of the building’s single-occupancy restrooms. Upon washing my hands prior to leaving, I hear knocking on the door. When it comes to these restrooms, it is customary to knock first in case someone is using it, even though there is an inner lock. When I opened the door, Mr. Booker was there. He smiled and very gregariously said, “Hey!” We engaged in some brief idle chitchat in the entryway and then he asked me to speak in private. What happened next, happened so fast that it was hard for me to comprehend what was going on. It was one of those surreal moments where what was happening was such a deviation and such a perversion of one’s natural daily routine that I hardly knew how to react. He pulled me into the bathroom, albeit not too forcefully, and slowly pushed me against the restroom wall. He said that “Being a hero was a serious turn-on.” He continued, “The Senate appreciates fine citizens like you. Especially this senator.” He then put his left hand on my groin, over my jeans, and began to rub. I seem to remember saying something like “What is happening?” It was a bit like having vertigo. He then used his other hand to grab my left hand with his right and pulled it over to touch him. At the same time, he disengaged from rubbing me and used his left hand to push me to my knees from my shoulder for what was clearly a move to have me perform oral sex on him. At that point, I pulled away quite violently and told him I had to go. I did not see him again before he left.

The victim says he contacted journalist Ronan Farrow, the “father of the #MeToo movement,” who requested a phone conversation but never got back to him after the victim gave Farrow his number.

He also contacted a lawyer. Grabien reached out to the attorney who is mentioned in the letter:

Grabien News has reached out to the accuser’s attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, to verify he has consulted with her, as he described in the letter.

“All I can say at this time is that the man is considering his next steps and has no further comment at this time,” Dhillon told Grabien.