RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is time for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) performance review. How have Candidate Trump’s campaign promises fared in President Trump’s White House?

When ex-president Obama promised President Trump the customary peaceful transition of power President Trump believed him – it was a devastating mistake and catastrophic for MAGA. Our new President is a savvy businessman and America needs his business expertise – but government business is even dirtier and more corrupt than the New York real estate business.

In real estate it is far easier to identify your enemies – in government the swamp creatures are camouflaged by their ever-changing colors, deceitful smiles, and ability to adapt. Swamp creatures are entirely self-serving – there are no teams or loyalties in the swamp – just survival.

For eight years ex-president liar-in-chief Obama staffed the United States government with Globalists, Islamists, and Leftist activists. His hope and change agenda was designed to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to create the social chaos required for seismic social change. Obama weaponized his pro-Muslim agenda and used it in his information war to destabilize America and create social chaos. He staffed the government with Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR members. Obama weakened the military and national security apparatus with training manuals rewritten to satisfy his MB/CAIR advisers that deliberately deleted any mention of Islam as the ideological inspiration for jihad terror. He used Common Core to re-educated our youth with a revisionist curriculum that rejects Judeo-Christian traditions and exalts Islam as a religion of peace. Obama was the media’s globalist darling and they covered up his crimes against America to advance the globalist agenda of their owners.

Make America Great Again advances Americanism. MAGA is the new program that President Trump brought to Washington to oppose globalism. So, after seven months what does the MAGA performance review reveal? A shocking reorganization from MAGA to GAMA – Globalists are Management Again.

In a stunning reversal of staffing all the President’s men are OUT and all the ex-president’s men are IN. This is a catastrophic management upheaval. It is simply impossible for President Trump to fulfill his campaign promises to MAGA with an oppositional staff that rejects Americanism, a Washington swamp that embraces globalism, a biased mainstream media that protects the globalists, a pro-Muslim educational system that idealizes globalism, and a national security apparatus that denies Islamic ideology is the inspiration for jihadi terrorism.

How did this happen? How does a dream become a nightmare? How does unlikely Candidate Trump become President Trump and then lose his way?

Thought precedes behavior. Businessman Trump built an empire by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

Candidate Trump became President Trump by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision MAGA, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

President Trump brought his MAGA vision to Washington but the globalist traps were already set. There was no peaceful transition of power as promised. Instead, the swamp offensive began. The first attack was on General Michael Flynn, a true America-first patriot who understood the clear and present danger of radical Islam. General Flynn had the information to expose Obama’s insidious master plan to destabilize and destroy America from within. The globalist swamp needed to destroy General Flynn’s credibility to survive and so they did. But the creatures were not satisfied and the swamp attacks continued.

President Trump’s America-first MAGA team that was designed to oppose and dismantle the existing globalist swamp in Washington was attacked relentlessly and has itself been devoured by the swamp creatures instead. Team members Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka – all disappeared. Obama loyalists H.R.. McMaster, Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson – all reappeared. Why?

‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer.

The terrified poet points out to the mob this case of mistaken identity: “I am Cinna the poet.”

The mob answers: “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses! . . . It is no matter, his name’s Cinna!”

Shakespeare certainly would recognize that, like the playwright’s Roman mob, we have launched a war against words in our frenzy to find targets for our politically correct madness.

Recently, there were progressive calls at the University of Southern California to rename the school’s mascot, the white Andalusian horse “Traveler.” Members of the Left thought that the mute animal’s name too closely resembled the name “Traveller,” the favorite horse of Confederate general and sudden demon of 2017 Robert E. Lee.

But the mob was not finished there. An Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee was recently yanked by the sports channel ESPN from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game. Apparently, Lee’s name was too close to that of Robert E. Lee.

Nearly a century and a half after his death, General Lee has gone from tragic figure to Public Enemy No. 1 of the Left.

Lee the sportscaster, like Cinna the poet, was found guilty on the basis of ignorant association with his name. If the politically correct herd could not get its hands on the long-dead Robert E. Lee, it would apparently settle for anyone in the present who shared nearly the same name.

Why would a supposedly civilized country descend into such linguistic fascism?

Part of the problem is the presumption by elites that a supposedly illiterate public must be protected from itself. But does anyone really believe that average people will confuse an Asian-American sportscaster who has the common Chinese surname “Lee” and the all-American first name “Robert” with a Confederate general — or that the sportscaster could thus be somehow tangentially connected with the recent violence in Charlottesville?

ESPN, however, does not bet on the intelligence of the average American. It prefers to virtue-signal that it is above all suspicion of sympathy for the Confederacy. In its search for cosmic justice, it cares little about the injustice it metes out to real live people.

ESPN has long politicized sports and continues to lose viewers over its adolescent political correctness. Not long ago, the network fired tennis commentator Doug Adler. He had characterized the aggressive play of tennis star Venus Williams as employing the “guerrilla effect.” (“And you’ll see Venus move in and put the guerrilla effect on, charging,” Adler had said.) Adler’s reference was drawn from the once-popular term “guerrilla tennis” that denoted a tough, brawling, take-no-prisoners style from the 1990s.

On August 28, The Anti-Defamation League announced that it had hired Obama holdover, George Selim, as its “Senior Vice President of Programs.” According to the ADL’s press release, Selim will be the ADL’s point man on programs connected to law enforcement, education and community security. This newly created position will ostensibly help the ADL better track, monitor and thwart all forms of xenophobia and prejudice. Selim will report directly to the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt.

On paper, Selim, an Arab-American of Egyptian and Lebanese descent, appears qualified for the role. He served in the Bush and Obama administrations in various capacities, principally in the areas of community outreach and countering violent extremism (CVE). But beneath the surface lies a more sinister side to Selim, one that renders him entirely unfit for his new position.

In a June 7, 2012 interview with the Daily Caller, Selim admitted engaging with representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and further acknowledged that there were “hundreds” of such meetings taking place with various governmental departments and agencies. Selim refused to elaborate on the content of those meetings and offered no insight on which CAIR officials he met with.

In 2007, the United States Department of Justice named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development criminal probe. Members of the HLF were charged with laundering money to Hamas, a genocidal organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department. The HLF and five of its officers were convicted of all charges.

CAIR objected to the DOJ designation but a U.S. District Court judge ruled that there was “ample evidence to establish the association.” That ruling was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. DOJ’s designation led the FBI to sever all “non-investigative cooperation with the group.”

Moreover, CAIR officials are on record spewing vicious anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol. Its founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, is a poster child for conspiracy theories and medieval-style anti-Semitism. He is a Hamas supporter, has refused to condemn acts of terrorism committed against Israeli civilians, rejects Israel’s right to exist, espoused anti-Semitic canards of Jewish influence and control over U.S. foreign policy, and as has entertained wild David Duke-like conspiracy theories suggesting that Israel had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Even Greenblatt’s ADL has recognized CAIR’s odious nature publishing a dossier of the group on its website.

An attorney in New York City thinks former President Obama may still be running the FBI after the bureau cited a “lack of public interest” in rejecting an open records request related to its investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Ty Clevenger filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request way back in March of 2016 asking for a variety of documents from the FBI and the Justice Department as part of an ongoing effort to get Clinton and her personal attorneys disbarred for mishandling official emails during her tenure as secretary of state.

The FBI shot down Clevenger’s request for information from the FBI’s files using the flimsiest of excuses.

Via the Washington Times:

“You have not sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs personal privacy interests of the subject,” FBI records management section chief David M. Hardy told Mr. Clevenger in a letter Monday.

“It is incumbent upon the requester to provide documentation regarding the public’s interest in the operations and activities of the government before records can be processed pursuant to the FOIA,” Mr. Hardy wrote.

Mrs. Clinton, is the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, former chief diplomat, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of both the U.S. and Arkansas.

Her use of a secret email account to conduct government business while leading the State Department was front-page news for much of 2015 and 2016, and was so striking that the then-FBI director broke with procedure and made both a public statement and appearances before Congress to talk about the bureau’s probe.

In the end, the FBI didn’t recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton, concluding that while she risked national security, she was too technologically inept to know the dangers she was running, so no case could be made against her.

Clevenger told the Times that he thought it was obvious why Mrs. Clinton’s case was of public interest, but he went ahead and sent the bureau documentation of congressional requests for an investigation into whether Clinton perjured herself anyway.

“I’m just stunned. This is exactly what I would have expected had Mrs. Clinton won the election, but she didn’t. It looks like the Obama administration is still running the FBI,” Mr. Clevenger told the Times. “How can a story receive national news coverage and not be a matter of public interest? If this is the new standard, then there’s no such thing as a public interest exception,” he said.

“It’s an absolute joke,” said former Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Fox News Wednesday morning. “The reality is, they do the exact same thing to Congress.”

Chaffetz, who joined Fox News as a political analyst after resigning from Congress in June, said:

The deep state will do everything it can to protect its own. There is no reason why those documents should be held from the public — but they also aren’t giving them to Congress. I issued a subpoena on this information! “There were congressional inquiries and they still didn’t give those documents. CONTINUE AT SITE

Imran Awan, the former Democrat IT staffer who was arrested last month at Dulles International Airport as he tried to flee the country amid an FBI and Capitol Police investigation, still has an active, secret email account on the House computer system, The Daily Caller reported Tuesday.

Awan and several members of his family — including his wife Hina Alvi — are being investigated by the FBI and Capitol Police for conspiracy, bank fraud, and cybersecurity violations. The clan was reportedly barred from using the computer networks at the House of Representatives back in February.

According to the Caller, Awan’s email address is still active “and linked to the name of a House staffer who specializes in intelligence and homeland security matters for Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson.”

Court documents and emails obtained by TheDCNF show Awan used the address 123@mail.house.gov in addition to his standard imran.awan@mail.house.gov account.

He and two of his Pakistani-born brothers, as well as his wife, are at the center of an FBI investigation over their IT work with dozens of Democratic congressional offices. Authorities shut down Awan’s standard email account Feb. 2, and he was arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport trying to board a flight to his native Pakistan on July 25.

Authorities apparently did not realize Awan has a second account that is not linked to his identity. While his main email address began rejecting mail after it was shut down, the 123 address was still accepting mail Tuesday.

The Daily Caller’s intrepid reporter Luke Rosiak discovered that the account belongs to Nathan Bennett, a Carson aide whose work in Congress includes “national security and foreign affairs” and work on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The member Bennett works for, Carson, is a member of both the House Intelligence and House Homeland Security Committees, and previously employed Awan. CONTINUE AT SITE

The history of academic criminology is one of grand pronouncements that don’t often prove out in the real world. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, criminologists demanded that public policy attack the “root causes” of crime, such as poverty and racism. Without solving these problems, they argued, we could not expect to fight crime effectively. On this thinking, billions of taxpayer dollars poured into ambitious social programs—yet crime went up, not down. In the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, as crime rates continued to spike, criminologists proceeded to tell us that the police could do little to cut crime, and that locking up the felons, drug dealers, and gang leaders who committed much of the nation’s criminal violence wouldn’t work, either.

These views were shown to be false, too, but they were held so pervasively across the profession that, when political scientist James Q. Wilson called for selective incapacitation of violent repeat offenders, he found himself ostracized by his peers, who resorted to ad hominem attacks on his character and motivations. Wilson’s work was ignored by awards committees, and criminological reviews of his books, especially Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, were almost universally negative. In the real-world policy arena, however, Wilson attained significant influence: the Broken Windows theory of policing and public order, which Wilson developed with criminologist George Kelling, became a key part of the proactive policing strategies that would be largely responsible for the great crime decline starting in the mid-1990s.

In short, while academic criminology has had much to say about crime, most of it has been wrong. How can an academic discipline be so wrongheaded? And should we listen to criminologists today when, say, they call for prisons to be emptied, cops to act as glorified playground attendants, and criminal sentences to be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated? Answers to the first question are readily available—and suggest the answer to the second.

Academic criminologists are mainly sociologists, trained in statistics and armed with theories. Though most don’t study crime or violence directly, they have produced useful studies about offenders and the criminal-justice system. Through their work, we know, for example, that criminal behavior is strongly intergenerational, that relatively few people account for the majority of all crimes, and that some offenders desist from crime over time but many others simply change the types of crimes they commit. We also have learned that most offenders are generalists—that is, they commit a diverse assortment of crimes—and that steps can be taken to reduce criminal events by making them more difficult to carry out. Most criminals, it turns out, are lazy.

In other ways, though, criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighborhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime. Most academics have never met with women who have been raped or children who have been molested, or seen the carnage wrought by a bullet that passed through a human skull, or spent a lot of time with police on the street. The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticized view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment.

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

A quick perusal of Presidential Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Justice, bestowed by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), shows that the winners were primarily rewarded for their left-wing advocacy. They included a judge in Massachusetts who advocated abolishing the state’s death penalty, an FBI agent who successfully sued the organization for ethnic discrimination, and a former director of juvenile corrections in Massachusetts who closed the state’s juvenile reformatories and wrote a book alleging that the system hunted down black men for sport. The society also honored Zaki Baruti, a radical black activist in St. Louis known for his hatred of police and support for leftist causes.

Recently, the ASC’s policy committee sent a mass e-mail to members, asking for help in countering a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Heather Mac Donald, a longtime City Journal contributing editor and a writer known for eviscerating liberal claims about the police and the justice system. Mac Donald argued that because of increased scrutiny and charges of racism, police had rolled back their efforts to deter crime, at least in minority communities, resulting in rising violence in many cities across the country. She called this the “Ferguson Effect,” after the town in Missouri where the (justified) police shooting of Michael Brown, a young black man, in 2014 ignited riots and gave rise to a new anti-law-enforcement push from advocates, the press, and Democratic politicians. The existence and extent of the Ferguson Effect is an empirical question that can be debated. But it is telling that the ASC had never shown any interest in rebutting the hundreds of editorials that repeated factually baseless claims about police shootings or the racism supposedly embedded in the criminal-justice system. Only Mac Donald’s work was singled out—as was Wilson’s, years earlier.

At one of the big summer events that enthrall those who dwell inside the D.C. bubble, interns from Conservatism, Inc. square off against interns from Libertarian, Inc. at a debate hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute. The annual event, which occurred earlier this month, once again exposed a problem that has hounded conservatives for quite some time: they’ve forgotten how to persuade. They speak in clichés. And even the youngsters sound like old fogeys. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/30/black-hole-modern-conservative-rhetoric/

“From what I observed,” writes Maria Beiry, an editorial assistant for the American Conservative who reported on the event, “millennials at this debate—many of whom will go on to be leaders in Washington—were not taking to conservatism.”

Why not? While the libertarians “favored data” and used it “to not only drive home their points but also to call into question the conservative argument,” conservatives spurned those arguments and “favored philosophy.”

“At the mention of philosophers such as Aristotle,” Beiry reports, “audible ‘what’s’ and ‘heh’s’ could be heard among the students.”

Jargon and Checklists
These difficulties flow from a central problem: conservatives seem to go out of their way not to be understood. More and more, there appears to be nothing of substance behind the jargon they employ.

Just as “Christianese”—used increasingly in Evangelical Christian circles—has had a tendency to crowd out biblical orthodoxy, “conservatese” has similarly tended to push aside anything of intellectual substance in political conservatism. Words and phrases that have been carefully crafted in the conservative echo chamber sound a false note when they’re used in front of audiences who aren’t predisposed to nod their heads in agreement.

And over time, such language has had a wearing and wearying effect on those who use it, dulling their minds in the process. Conservative rhetoric has become full of slogans and shortcuts for arguments—mere boxes on a checklist—rather than invitations to dialogue and debate.

As Paul Gottfried points out, vague sentiments such as “the permanent things” and words like “values” appropriated and defined in the popular imagination by Progressives have come to define conservative rhetoric. It’s become a bit of a joke that’s apparently over the heads of those who regularly speak in such dreary ways.

Modern conservative rhetoric also has a penchant for the non-political, attempting to drain political life of its vitality and seeking to replace it with the contemplative life simply.

For instance, the notion that “beauty will save the world” heard on many a serious liberal arts campus offers no real guidance for politics and can be harmful for the young, especially because they are so likely to misunderstand it. Children, after all, are typically moved by their untutored passions rather than by reason and often mistake ugliness or fads for beauty. On an intellectual level, this kind of rhetoric is imprecise, sloppy, and undermines the philosophical foundations upon which the conservative project is built. Cut it out, already.

Conservative Rhetoric on Race
Not all conservative rhetoric, however, is quite so self-defeating.

The argument from some conservatives that the “Democrats are the real racists” should not be so easily dismissed. It is an understandable attempt to turn the tables on their foes, pointing out that Republicans have a much better track record on civil rights and simultaneously laying bare the Democrats’ grim legacy on race.

Gerard Alexander, for example, has demolished the narrative that the Republicans’ rise in the South in the latter half of the 20th century was due to racism. In a deep dive into the research, he shows

the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones.

The GOP, of course, was founded on anti-slavery principles. The Republican Party platform of 1856 opposed both slavery and, interestingly, polygamy, calling them the “twin relics of barbarism.”

Democrats, in contrast, historically have been more opposed to the principle of natural human equality than not. From Alexander Stephens, who as the vice president of the Confederacy argued that the principle of equality was an “error,” to Barbara Norton, a Louisiana state representative who said that the founders were “teaching . . . a lie” when they wrote “all men are created equal,” Democrats have habitually been on the wrong side of human equality.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left outfit that labels mainstream conservative organizations “hate groups” and whose “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, has released a map of every Confederate monument in America. But the map does not just include statues: it also lists towns, cities, counties, and even middle schools that bear the names of Confederate generals.

“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed,” the SPLC posted with the map (emphasis added). “It’s time to take them down” (emphasis original).

The post urges visitors to send a letter to the editor of their local newspaper. “White supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week in defense of a Confederate monument. We must show the country that [your city’s or county’s name] gives no safe harbor to such hatred. We must remove the monument at [location],” the sample letter read.

“If our government continues to pay homage to the Confederacy, people of color can never be sure they will be treated fairly,” the letter continued. “And we will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.”

As is often the case when the SPLC takes up a cause, this issue is far from clear cut. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 62 percent of Americans supported leaving “statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy” standing. At the same time, 86 percent of those in the poll said they disagreed with white supremacy and 73 percent said they disagreed with white nationalists.

Even African Americans favored keeping the statues (44 percent to 40 percent). Indeed, a group in Dallas organized to protect Confederate statues — and the members are mostly African-American.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it. It doesn’t scare me,” former city council member Sandra Crenshaw, a black woman, told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. “We don’t want America to think that all African Americans are supportive of” removing the statues. She denounced as “misguided” the idea that “by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism.”

But the SPLC not only encourages this “misguided” idea, it warns of “more turmoil and bloodshed” unless the statues are removed.

The group does not only list statues, either. Its Confederate map includes counties named after Confederate generals like Lee County, Fla., in the Fort Myers area. It also includes parks like Confederate Park in Demopolis, Ala. It lists cities like the city of Fort Bragg in California. CONTINUE AT SITE

Video has surfaced showing masked Antifa thugs in Berkeley, California, last weekend calling for the destruction of the United States.

“No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!” the large gathering of cowardly black bloc-style protesters chanted at a conservative “No to Marxism” rally.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Antifa, short for anti-fascists, are the de facto militant arm of today’s Democratic Party, just as the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the murderous terrorist wing of the party many years ago.

“This is a political militia that is doing the bidding, in effect, of Nancy Pelosi and Governor Jerry Brown and the mayor of Berkeley and all these supposedly mainstream Democratic politicians, and this is a militia hurting American citizens for saying what they think,” Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News Channel show Monday.

Democrat office-holders are loathe to condemn the Antifa terrorists because Antifa sympathizers are their political base. Antifa enthusiasts in the mainstream media and in social media treat Antifa like courageous Freedom Riders and liken them to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day to liberate Europe from the real-life Nazi menace. There may be some radical, dangerous kooks in the Republican Party, but they are vastly outnumbered by the radical adrenaline-fueled crazies who run in Democrat circles.

Left-wingers like the stunningly obtuse media personality Touré romanticize Antifa. “If white supremacists are American terrorists then those willing to physically fight them are doing heroic work,” he tweeted.

But who’s to say which people are “white supremacists”? The Left smears everyone it doesn’t like as racists and neo-Nazis.

Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer is a leading apologist for Antifa violence. After the Antifa-initiated rioting that police allowed at the “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley last weekend, he tweeted, “The narrative forming of today online is that it was super violent in Berkeley. There were some fights, but overall it wasn’t actually.”

Besides, the Antifa had good intentions, he implied. “There were thousands demonstrating against hate.”

Police said 13 suspects “were arrested on suspicion of various offenses, including assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault and violating the Berkeley Municipal Code.” Six people were reportedly injured.

This brings to mind the quotation attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

And maybe one can’t, after all, expect much from the Democratic Party, which by way of a DNC resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, officially endorses black-on-white violence and the murder of police officers. Condemning vicious radical left-wing hooligans hurts their reelection chances as they risk being characterized as soft on “fascism.”

President Obama allowed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to run wild in recent years. Obama even rewarded riot-inciters and those who support killing police by hosting them at the White House. Instead of protecting citizens and their property, some politicians even admit pro-rioting policies openly, as when then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) acknowledged in April 2015 that authorities “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”

Many of those same Democrats who stridently insisted to every TV news camera they could find for days that President Trump had to condemn by name, political affiliation, and ideological affinity the groups involved in the misnamed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over and over again are strangely silent when it comes to their terrorist Antifa friends.

” Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.”

I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left’s war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston.

At one time, this would have been a heartwarming story – like the Brits and the Krauts playing footie in no man’s land at Christmas 1914. Why, look! Houston’s oldest surviving Confederate general is recognizing our shared humanity by taking his boat to rescue the children of his former plantation slaves! But we live in a sterner age, and the appropriate response to an offer of rescue from a vessel flying the Stars & Bars is to riddle it below the waterline and dispatch its cap’n to Johnny Reb’s Locker.

Elsewhere, the cultural hurricane swirls on. In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance. WREG-TV reports:

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “Gone With the Wind” will be gone from The Orpheum’s summer movie series, the theater’s board said Friday.

The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.

“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement.

As Scarlett O’Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day – Pol Pot’s Year Zero as Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words “Because it’s 2015.” Why have a “gender-balanced cabinet”? Because it’s 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: “Because it’s 2017”, and anything that came before must be destroyed.

Totalitarianism is a young man’s game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all “old white men” who’ll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it’s true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret:

Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

Ah, but who watches Cabaret in 2017, never mind Gone with the Wind? From The New York Post comes an arresting headline – “Millennials Don’t Really Care About Classic Movies”:

A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s.

Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”

My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:

This is literally the cause of all our problems.

She means it:

You can learn almost everything about life from movies… You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or “Solution” Y… Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a “free speech on campus” subplot…

But you can only learn “almost everything about life” if you stumble across movies. Very few people seek out Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). For the ensuing third of a century, it was the sort of thing that would turn up on the Late Show when you weren’t quite ready to call it a night – or on a rainy afternoon when you were overly familiar with that day’s “Leave It to Beaver” rerun and weren’t in the mood for Merv Griffin. Now we live in an age where the haphazard rewards of “stumbling across” have been entirely eliminated: You programme your own tastes on your own device, and you can live within those constraints 24/7.