RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://pjmedia.com/video/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-we-have-to-fight-climate-change-like-we-fought-the-nazis-in-world-war-ii/

In remarks captured on video Friday night, Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the threat of man-made climate change to the threat from Nazi Germany in World War II. She suggested that the U.S. efforts in that war should be seen as a “blueprint” for remaking America’s economy in the environmentalists’ image.

“So when we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II, so we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of doing this before,” Ocasio-Cortez began.

“What we had was an existential threat in the context of war,” the candidate added. “And what we did was, we chose to mobilize our entire economy, industrialize our entire economy, and we put hundreds of thousands and millions of people to work on defending our shores and this country.”

Then came the kicker: “We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy.”

According to Ocasio-Cortez, climate change is an existential threat, just like Nazi Germany was. Therefore, America has to rethink its entire economy. The government should nationalize entire industries, directing everything to the goal of “renewable energy.”

In other words, “war socialism” without the war. Ocasio-Cortez later admitted, “It may seem like really big, it may seem very ambitious, it may seem very radical, but we are dealing with a radical truth.”

Earlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a breathless report. In the words of Washington Post reporters Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, that’s 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, over preindustrial levels would require a rapid and far reaching transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found” (emphasis added).

The difficulty is, politically-charged groups like the IPCC do not acknowledge how limited the current scientific knowledge about human impact on global climate really is. While it stands to reason that burning fossil fuels may have some impact on the climate, the exact impact remains unknown.

Alarmists claim the science is settled, but prediction after prediction has failed to come true, and the Maldives — which were supposed to be under water by now — still remain resolutely above the waves. Meanwhile, National Geographic had to retract an unscientific message in a misleading video. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/crazed-liberal-attacks-mitch-mcconnells-table-at-restaurant-tosses-food-out-the-door/

Mitch McConnell was assaulted at a restaurant ho-hum. That’s your summary of the headlines you’ll see about this from the MSM. Because they don’t really care about it.

TMZ has the story and the video. It would go without saying if it weren’t important to say, but…
Caleb Howl

✔ @CalebHowe
http://www.tmz.com/2018/10/20/senator-mitch-mcconnell-confronted-restaurant-protesters/ …

“The woman who shot the video tells us, before she started recording, the main aggressor slammed his fists down on McConnell’s table, grabbed his doggie bag and threw the food out the door of the restaurant.”

The Kentucky Senator was eating dinner with his wife at Havana Rumba in Louisville, when 4 men confronted Mitch. The main aggressor screams at McConnell, “Why don’t you get out of here? Why don’t you leave the entire country?”

The woman who shot the video tells us, before she started recording, the main aggressor slammed his fists down on McConnell’s table, grabbed his doggie bag and threw the food out the door of the restaurant.

The woman says the main gripe seemed to be the Senator’s stance on Social Security and health care. McConnell recently said entitlement programs are the main cause of massive debt. The woman says before she started shooting, the main aggressor was screaming that McConnell was killing people with his views. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/supreme-court-judicial-philosophy-constitutional-system/

Defining the proper role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system

Editor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of articles in which Mr. Yoo and Mr. Phillips will lay out a course of constitutional restoration, pointing out areas where the Supreme Court has driven the Constitution off its rails and the ways the current Court can put it back on track.

The end of the sordid ordeal that led to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation provides conservatives the opportunity to think deeply about what they want from the Supreme Court. Conservatives, of course, would have fought for Kavanaugh whether he was a stalwart Clarence Thomas or a wandering Anthony Kennedy. At stake were the principles of fairness and due process that should guide all of our institutions, even when they intersect with the #MeToo movement’s claims. The courts, Congress, federal agencies, state governments, and even the most delusional of our great societal institutions — the media and our colleges and universities — must not banish facts, proof, and the right to be heard.

But now that Justice Kavanaugh has assumed his seat on the Court, conservatives can take a step back and consider their agenda for the future. Democrats launched their scorched-earth war against Kavanaugh, an outstanding judge and distinguished public servant, precisely because his appointment promised a reliable fifth vote for a conservative majority. There’s a good argument to be made that conservatives have not had such a working majority on the Court since 1936. Even though Republican presidents have appointed the majority of justices since 1968, when Richard Nixon won on a law-and-order platform, their appointments have often “grown in office” and drifted leftwards. But the outrageousness of Democratic attacks on Justice Kavanaugh should guarantee that he will not follow in the path of Republican-appointed Justices such as Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter, who became lions of the Left.

The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to reconsider doctrines at odds with the Constitution’s original meaning. Before they devolved into an ugly political and personal brawl, Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings revealed, among other things, the fault lines in American constitutional politics.

Democratic senators, as well as their expert witnesses called in opposition, advanced a view of a judge as simply the enabler of a political party’s policy preferences. They cross-examined Judge Kavanaugh on the specific outcomes he had reached in cases relating to certain groups of interest: minorities, women, environmental organizations, and the like. In their view, the only difference between a judge and a congressman is the former wears a robe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/justice-department-charges-russian-interference-midterm-election/

The Justice Department charged a Russian national on Friday with conspiring to interfere in America’s midterm elections.

Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States in the first criminal case to confront Russian efforts to interfere in the upcoming elections. Khusyaynova, who is not in American custody, is alleged to have spent almost two and a half years in charge of a Russian influence operation’s $35 million budget, part of which was used to conduct what the group called “information warfare against the United States,” including “promoting news postings on social networks.”

According to prosecutors’ indictment, the group, Project Lakhta, pretended to be American political activists during both the 2016 and 2018 election seasons in order to sow divisions by highlighting controversial issues, including immigration, gun control, the Confederate flag, race relations, LGBT issues, the Women’s March, and the NFL national anthem controversy.

“Through supporting radical groups” the conspirators aimed to “aggravate the conflict between minorities and the rest of the population,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

“The strategic goal of this alleged conspiracy, which continues to this day, is to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions,” U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger said.

“The Conspirators’ activities did not exclusively adopt one ideological viewpoint; they wrote on topics from varied and sometimes opposing perspectives,” FBI Special Agent David Holt wrote in the criminal complaint.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-york-man-arrested-for-threatening-kavanaugh-supporting-senators/

Another day, another unhinged Democrat is arrested for threatening to kill Republicans.

Ronald DeRisi, 74, of Smithtown, Long Island, was arrested Friday morning after allegedly leaving more than ten “threatening voice messages” at the offices of two senators because of their support for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

DeRisi allegedly called the home state offices of the senators and left “expletive-laced” threats, according to the federal complaint.

The senators are not named in the complaint, but the New York Post has identified them as Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

In a Sept. 27 message, DeRisi allegedly left a voice message claiming he had a “present” for “Senator-1” (Grassley), saying, “It’s a 9 millimeter. Side of your f***ing skull you scumbag motherf*cker.”

The 85-year-old senator got another call that same day, saying: “We’re tired of this guy sucking taxpayers’ money! Getting a free f***ing ride! How many more years you gonna do it? None! He’s a dead man! 9 millimeter, side of the f***ing head! If f***ing Kavanaugh gets in, he’s dead f***ing meat! Actually even if Kavanaugh doesn’t get in he’s dead f***ing meat. 9 millimeter, side of the head, you f***ing old bastard.”