RUTHFULLY YOURS

If it is to mean anything, it will remain Judeo-Christian, open to all.https://spectator.org/the-need-for-an-american-national-identity/

Many were elated and approved President Trump’s July speech in Warsaw, Poland acknowledging the central role Western civilization plays in defining who we are and what we believe. Our freedom and survival depend on defending it, he said. Beyond that, he celebrated Western civilization as something extraordinary: “What we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.”

A vocal few, popular in leftwing opinion circles, condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks as an affront to multiculturalism, labeling his linkage of us with Western civilization, and our pride in it, as “tribalism, white nationalism, and racism,” claiming that references to Western civilization and ancestors are code words for the above mentioned vices. For some, even the broad term Western civilization is offensive and prejudicial since, as with all definitions, it necessarily conveys something distinctive and thus circumscribed.

The question we should answer is: does a country or nation need an identity, a unique identity with salient features that distinguish it from other countries and nations? In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville gave a resounding affirmation, a yes, to the need for a specific identity. He wrote that a corporate entity remains what it is as long as it operates by the principles upon which it was founded. When it changes those principles, it becomes something entirely different, and the success it had, based on its original formula, becomes uncertain and imperiled. It atrophies and declines. He spoke not against periodic tinkering but warned against fundamental transformation.

According to the wise and prescient Tocqueville, we define an entity by its original principles and the values that created its success. These are the seeds that animate it and supply its people with special spirit. What, then, is America’s identity?

Some say it lies in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which grant us the liberties that enshrine our peoplehood and, on a functional level, make possible a daily life open to achievement, aspirations, and human potential. Our way of life and the blessings that have come to us depend on everyone living within this Constitutional framework and by precluding its replacement or abridgement with another set of laws claiming to be a “higher morality” or temporarily more important, or by enacting waivers or special accommodation in the name of multiculturalism.

There are those today wishing to sideline the Constitution and our historic way of life by invalidating the men, and thus the ideas, behind it. Using charges of racism as the singular and only important lens in which to judge a person’s value, they nullify the totality, the overwhelming contributions, and extraordinary sacrifices of great men and women of a different era. Meanwhile, they grant themselves unassailable superiority and rigid final judgment simply because of their claims to victimhood or for espousing one of the many isms in today’s pantheon for self-righteous virtue signaling. A nation’s historic identity is being replaced by identity politics, culminating frequently in automatic indictment of historical figures simply because their race or moral values are now out of fashion.

There are those in America wishing to define us strictly as a nation of tolerance and inclusivity, this deification resulting often, as in Europe, in tolerating the intolerable and including everyone and everything to the point of endangering those in society not ensconced within rarified and protective gates. They think the best identity is no identity. But this vacuum and void, as witnessed in Europe, allows for other assertive or aggressive identities and mores to creep within and replace, zone by zone; for surely, strong and energized identities will replace the mushy identity of No Identity.

Jews across America welcome Rosh Hashanah this week, the Jewish New Year, and receive greetings from our President. You might assume the annual Presidential greetings are meaningless boilerplate, but they are actually quite revealing of the Presidents’ feelings towards Jews and Israel – and towards the Muslim threat to America.

Here is President Trump, whom the Democrat media would have us believe is a new Hitler:

I am proud to stand with the Jewish people and with our cherished friend and ally, the State of Israel. The Jewish State is a symbol of resilience in the face of oppression — it has persevered in the face of hostility, championed democracy in the face of violence, and succeeded in the face of very, very tall odds. The United States will always support Israel not only because of the vital security partnership between our two nations, but because of the shared values between our two peoples. And I can tell you on a personal basis, and I just left Israel recently, I love Israel.

That is why my administration has successfully pressured the United Nations to withdraw the unfair and biased report against Israel — that was a horrible thing that they did — and to instead focus on real threats to our security, such as Iran, Hezbollah, and ISIS.

Read the whole speech here.

Our former President, Barack Hussein Obama, struck a very different note in his first Rosh Hashanah greetings. Using his familiar tone of condescending preachiness, Obama told the Jews of America to repent and remember those in need, and promoted the Palestinian cause. (Remembering, I am overwhelmed with New Year’s gratitude for President Trump.) This was President Obama’s message:

At a time when prejudice and oppression still exist in the shadows of our society, it is up to us to stand as a beacon of freedom and tolerance and embrace the diversity that has always made us stronger as a people…today we had an opportunity to move forward, toward the goal we share — two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Astonishing for a political holiday greeting, Obama had not one word of praise for Judaism or American Jews. In fact, he said the word “Jews” only once.

In contrast, Obama’s Ramadan message to American Muslims was a weird outpouring of praise:

Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings. … Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.

Obama false list of Muslim virtues is actually a list of what Islam is not. Yet these precise virtues are strikingly true of American Jews, for whom Obama had not one good thing to say – nothing.

President Trump’s Ramadan message in May, as the Washington Post noted with dismay, focused on our fight against Islamic terrorism:

This year, the holiday begins as the world mourns the innocent victims of barbaric terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and Egypt, acts of depravity that are directly contrary to the spirit of Ramadan. Such acts only steel our resolve to defeat the terrorists and their perverted ideology.

On my recent visit to Saudi Arabia, I had the honor of meeting with the leaders of more than 50 Muslim nations. There, in the land of the two holiest sites in the Muslim world, we gathered to deliver together an emphatic message of partnership for the sake of peace, security, and prosperity for our countries and for the world.

This week CNN is reporting more details on the Obama Administration’s 2016 surveillance of people connected to the presidential campaign of the party out of power. It seems that once President Obama’s appointee to run the FBI, James Comey, had secured authorization for wiretapping, the bureau continued its surveillance into 2017. CNN reports:

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

This means the wiretapping was authorized more than ten months ago and perhaps more than a year ago. It was presumably a tough decision for a judge to issue a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling the administration to spy on someone connected with the presidential campaign of its political adversaries.

One would presumably only approve such an order if the request presented by the executive branch was highly compelling and likely to produce evidence that the subject of the wiretap was in fact working with Russia to disrupt U.S. elections. Roughly a year later, as the public still waits for such evidence, this column wonders how this judge is feeling now, especially now that CNN has reported that at least two of its three sources believe the resulting evidence is inconclusive.

One would also presume—or at least hope—that seeking to wiretap associates of the leader of the political opposition is not an everyday occurrence in any administration. At the very least, it seems highly unlikely that such a decision would be made by a mid-level official. CNN notes, “Such warrants require the approval of top Justice Department and FBI officials, and the FBI must provide the court with information showing suspicion that the subject of the warrant may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

It seems reasonable for the public to know exactly which officials made this decision and who else they consulted or informed of their surveillance plans. Was the President briefed on the details of this investigation?

And as for the information showing suspicion, where did the FBI come up with that? A September 7 column from the Journal’s Kim Strassel raises disturbing questions, based on recent events and a Washington Post story from last winter. Ms. Strassel writes:

The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele. ..

The Washington Post in February reported that Mr. Steele “was familiar” to the FBI, since he’d worked for the bureau before. The newspaper said Mr. Steele had reached out to a “friend” at the FBI about his Trump work as far back as July 2016. The Post even reported that Mr. Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

When Donald Trump claimed in March that he’d had his “wires tapped” prior to the election, the press and Obama officials dismissed the accusation as a fantasy. We were among the skeptics, but with former director James Comey’s politicized FBI the story is getting more complicated.

CNN reported Monday that the FBI obtained a warrant last year to eavesdrop on Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager from May to August in 2016. The story claims the FBI first wiretapped Mr. Manafort in 2014 while investigating his work as a lobbyist for Ukraine’s ruling party. That warrant lapsed, but the FBI convinced the court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to issue a second order as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the election.

Guess who has lived in a condo in Trump Tower since 2006? Paul Manafort.

The story suggests the monitoring started in the summer or fall, and extended into early this year. While Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign in August, he continued to speak with Candidate Trump. It is thus highly likely that the FBI was listening to the political and election-related conversations of a leading contender for the White House. That’s extraordinary—and worrisome.

Mr. Comey told Congress in late March that he “had no information that supports those [Trump] tweets.” Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was even more specific that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against—the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” He denied that any such FISA order existed. Were they lying?

The warrant’s timing may also shed light on the FBI’s relationship to the infamous “ Steele dossier.” That widely discredited dossier claiming ties between Russians and the Trump campaign was commissioned by left-leaning research firm Fusion GPS and developed by former British spy Christopher Steele—who relied on Russian sources. But the Washington Post and others have reported that Mr. Steele was familiar to the FBI, had reached out to the agency about his work, and had even arranged a deal in 2016 to get paid by the FBI to continue his research.

The FISA court sets a high bar for warrants on U.S. citizens, and presumably even higher for wiretapping a presidential campaign. Did Mr. Comey’s FBI marshal the Steele dossier to persuade the court?

All of this is reason for House and Senate investigators to keep exploring how Mr. Comey’s FBI was investigating both presidential campaigns. Russian meddling is a threat to democracy but so was the FBI if it relied on Russian disinformation to eavesdrop on a presidential campaign. The Justice Department and FBI have stonewalled Congressional requests for documents and interviews, citing the “integrity” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

But Mr. Mueller is not investigating the FBI, and in any event his ties to the bureau and Mr. Comey make him too conflicted for such a job. Congress is charged with providing oversight of law enforcement and the FISA courts, and it has an obligation to investigate their role in 2016. The intelligence committees have subpoena authority and the ability to hold those who don’t cooperate in contempt.

Mr. Comey investigated both leading presidential campaigns in an election year, playing the role of supposedly impartial legal authority. But his maneuvering to get Mr. Mueller appointed, and his leaks to the press, have shown that Mr. Comey is as political and self-serving as anyone in Washington. No investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign will be credible or complete without the facts about all Mr. Comey’s wiretaps.

How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery?

To use a shopworn phrase, “It’s complicated.”

Good Ol’ Rebels

Well before the end of Jim Crow, post-war leftist Hollywood still largely continued its soft mythologies of the Confederate Lost Cause. Perhaps the cinematic romance arose because of the lucrative fumes of earlier Gone with the Wind fantasies, which themselves might’ve come from an understandable desire to play a part in “binding up the nation’s wounds.”

In George Stevens’s mythic Shane (1953), the tragedy of the post–Civil War heroic gunslinger seems eerily tied to his past as an against-the-odds ex-Reb. In contrast, the movie’s odious villain, Unionist Jack Wilson, is a hired gun and company man (brilliantly portrayed by then newcomer Jack Palance).

Wilson shows off his bought cred by gunning down a naïve southern sodbuster, “Stonewall” Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.), accompanied by slurs about the Confederacy. (“I’m saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You too.”)

In the movie’s final shootout, replaying the Civil War provides the catalyst for more violence. This time Shane — and the heroic South — wins for good, with a payback Civil War exchange with Wilson:

Shane: I’ve heard about you, Jack Wilson.
Wilson: What have you heard, Shane?
Shane: I’ve heard that you’re a low-down Yankee liar.
Wilson: Prove it.

Wilson is then blown back across the barroom under a hail of bullets. Even out on the Wyoming range, the Hollywood subtext is that sodbuster homesteaders can find a former Confederate loser to protect them, with courage and chivalry, against the northern corporatists trying to steamroll them. The noble savior Shane, we are assumed to believe, had no part in slavery or insurrection but was fighting for his southern soil in service to the Confederacy.

Part of the dark mystery and tragedy of John Ford’s anti-hero Ethan Edwards in The Searchers originates in Edwards’s edgy Lost Cause mettle — and acts of bravery that never seem to result in his own positive outcome. His prior stint with the Confederacy is alluded to not just to remind the audience of his unrepentant side but also to emphasize the origins of Edwards’s formidable skills, doggedness, and principles — especially valuable in times (and only during such times) when frontier law fails and such assets are necessary, even if acquired in nihilist service to the losing side.

John Ford drew on that Confederate romance of noble opponents in several films, from Stagecoach (1939) to The Horse Soldiers (1959). A common theme is audacity fueled by admirable past loyalty to a bad cause, a key ingredient in classic portraits of the tragic hero from Homer to Erwin Rommel.

Hollywood Westerns — often in the 1950s and early 1960s — increasingly saw in the Confederate romance a way of reuniting the country, and they partook of the leftist pushback against a federal establishment. Indeed, it is hard to watch a Western in which a southern officer is portrayed purely negatively. At worst, they are daydreamers plotting to rebuild a western confederacy (Rio Conchos). At best, they play into the stereotypes that the better fighters of the South lost the war only because of overwhelming industrial output and manpower of the North — and thus former Confederates are especially valuable Indian fighters on the frontier, a safe space for them that is the United States but not the North.

The True Grit movies have a larger-than-life Rooster Cogburn character, an anti-hero and former member of the Quantrill Raiders, the pro-Confederate rangers’ gang that included Jesse and Frank James. John Wayne first portrayed Cogburn in 1969, in a finale to his earlier southern roles in John Ford’s cavalry movies.

In 1969’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Clint Eastwood mastered the art of portraying Confederates as noble opponents, especially in a haunting scene of an oppressive Union POW camp overseen by a psychopathic criminal commandant, set to the moving lyrics of Ennio Morricone’s “Story of a Soldier.”

Eastwood later went the full Confederate, in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). The former son of the South, Wales becomes a 1970s cowboy version of Dirty Harry, serving as a jack-of-all-trades multiculturalist equalizer — fighting back against vicious northern red-leg marauders and in behalf of abandoned women, the poor, and Native Americans.

The supposedly left-wing 1960s and 1970s, in fact, were the heyday of Confederate Chic. True, there were plenty of In the Heat of the Night portraits of the now-familiar racist white Neanderthals, but with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation, the romance of the Old South reappeared

The Paris Commune, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the California legislative supermajority of Dems are shining examples of what happens when insane leftists take over a formerly prosperous place.

“The issue of resistance is beyond the symbolism,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon declared. “A lot of other municipalities, as well as other states, are looking towards California … to be the leader of this resistance.”

The “resistance” is to President Trump, democracy and sanity. California has the best student government in the world. And like every student government, it’s eager to serve every leftist cause.

Forget good government. California is leading the “resistance.”

California lawmakers don’t waste time on trivialities like the pension bomb. Instead they tackle the serious issues. That’s why the California Assembly passed a bill mandating that Trump publish his taxes. The bill is unconstitutional. U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton settled that back in the 90s. If California wants to revisit that, it’ll have to rely on a dissent from Clarence Thomas. Not to mention Scalia.

The bill would be signed by Governor Brown who hasn’t released his own tax returns.

But following the law is for Republicans and little people.

And California legislators compulsively generate bills that are immune to math, laws, precedent or legality. And that can only produce a complete and utter disaster if they are implemented.

And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

In addition to the multiple gratuitous legislative attacks on President Trump, which are as bizarre as they are unprecedented, there was a bill, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, to remove sex offenders from the sex offender registry. Wiener claimed that the sex offender registry was homophobic. The bill, which passed, will allow child rapists to be removed after 20 years, and gives child pornography distributors a pass after 10 years.

A spokesman for Governor Brown, whose former pal Jim Jones would have been thrilled by the legislation, spoke glowingly of the bill. But this is a state in which a statue of another Jim Jones ally, Harvey Milk, the Democrat pedophile who lured runaway teens, decorates San Francisco City Hall.

Move over undocumented immigrants. Here come the undocumented sex offenders.

Sadly, the “supervised heroin” bill which would have allowed heroin addicts to shoot up under the supervision of “qualified medical professionals” failed. But Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman claims that her bill got lots of “momentum” and will be back. Eggman is a member of both the LGBT Caucus and the Latino Legislative Caucus. And those are the only qualifications in California politics now.

Worse news still, it’s now illegal to ingest “any marijuana product while driving”. But employers are not allowed to ask about your criminal history.

California did manage to pass the “Gender Recognition Act” inventing “non-binary” as a new gender and a bill sealing the juvenile records of teenagers who commit murder and other horrifying crimes.

The sanctuary state bill that bars law enforcement from asking illegal alien criminals if they’re illegal aliens went through to media applause. Landlords are also prohibited from reporting illegal aliens to the authorities. Businesses would be forced to demand a warrant from ICE: whether they want to or not.

“An employer… shall not provide voluntary consent to an immigration enforcement agent to enter any nonpublic areas of a place of labor,” the latter bill mandates.

The bill actually punishes Californians for cooperating with Federal law enforcement. Where do they think they live anyway? America?

There are extensive fines for landlords and businesses that choose to follow United States law and actually cooperate with immigration authorities.

Before long, everyone in California will be banned from reporting illegal aliens.

Spare a thought for poor Bill de Blasio. As cities across the South are shedding their Confederate memorials faster than you can say Stonewall Jackson, what New York’s mayor wouldn’t give for a larger-than-life Robert E. Lee bronze in full “Gone With the Wind” glory that he could order taken down.

Instead, he had to content himself with the announcement, days after last month’s deadly protest in Charlottesville, that the violence there had led him to order a 90-day review of “all symbols of hate on city property.”

Alas for the mayor, the Confederate pickings in his Yankee city are slim. The president of Bronx Community College found busts of Jackson and Lee and removed them. The Episcopalians took down two plaques commemorating a maple tree that Lee planted outside a now-closed church when he was stationed at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton in the 1840s. The tree itself lives, despite its Confederate roots.

But it was left to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to embrace the full absurdity of the moment when it declared that a mosaic at a Times Square subway stop is not in fact meant to be a Confederate flag—but will be altered anyway because it too closely resembles one.

Polls show most Americans oppose the removal of Confederate memorials, at least by mobs or politicians winking at them. Even so, the vandals are ascendant. In recent days Francis Scott Key joined a list of statuesque notables, from Joan of Arc to Wall Street’s Charging Bull, that have been toppled or otherwise despoiled.

Mr. de Blasio is hardly the only pol to grandstand here. But as mayor of the nation’s largest city—and America’s self-styled progressive-in- chief—his eagerness helps illuminate why these hunts for hate hold such an attraction for the Democratic left.

One big reason is that the left’s identity politics is not about healing old wounds. It’s about picking at them. Is there anyone in New York who believes a de Blasio panel rummaging through the city’s monuments for evidence of “hate” will contribute to either greater reconciliation or a deeper appreciation for the complexities of the Civil War?

Second, even where the charge of hate is outrageous, the accusation puts political opponents on the moral defensive. Look at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most of Washington understands the SPLC’s hate designations are arbitrary and political. But in a confirmation hearing earlier this month for Amy Barrett, an eminently qualified nominee for the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Al Franken berated her for having appeared before an SPLC-designated “hate group.”

The “hate group”? The Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-liberty outfit whose “hate” turns out to be holding traditional Christian views on marriage and sexuality. CONTINUE AT SITE