RUTHFULLY YOURS

Christopher Columbus was an American-style entrepreneur. He conceived his project alone, suffering in poverty for nearly a decade while raising the money to sail west in search of a backdoor route to the Indies of the East. Most of us can’t begin to grasp the scope of Columbus’s insatiable curiosity, intellectual drive and accomplishments of navigation. Most of us couldn’t find the hamper without a GPS.

Leaving dry land in August 1492 Columbus depended entirely on his brilliant mind, experience and research to guide him. It was common knowledge no one had ventured into that vast expanse of water—lately called the Atlantic—and lived to tell the tale.

Columbus believed he could do it. He read Ptolemy and Marco Polo. His copy of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s “Imago Mundi” contained 898 margin notes in Columbus’s own hand.

Europeans had been accustomed to traveling over land to China, Japan and India to trade for goods. After the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims of the expanding Ottoman Empire in 1453, those ventures became dangerous. The sea became the salvation of European trade.

After three months at sea Columbus disembarked in a place no European knew existed. He believed he had reached the Indies, when in fact he was in the Caribbean. He never set foot on the North American continent. It was a monumental achievement, just not the one he was hoping for.

Today when everything is instantly known—or we think it is—it is impossible to understand how 15th-century European attitudes shaped Columbus. He hoped the profits from his voyage could finance the liberation of the Holy Land from Muslim domination. He also hoped to spread the word of God.

It’s intellectually dicey to judge those who lived hundreds of years ago according to modern norms. Doctors who routinely infected women during childbirth out of ignorance of the germ theory of disease are not reviled today. But European explorers who were similarly ignorant about how diseases are spread are routinely abused for the illnesses that befell inhabitants of the New World from lack of natural immunity.

The Columbian exchange benefited Old World and New by spreading knowledge of science, agriculture and nutrition. Without Columbus, the Renaissance may not have succeeded. Without his discoveries, Italians wouldn’t have marinara sauce, the Irish wouldn’t have mashed potatoes, and the Swiss wouldn’t have chocolate. Because America and its freedoms exist, children no longer contract polio and many other diseases. America saved the world from totalitarianism twice in the last century.

Today Columbus’s reputation is under siege. But those seeking to delegitimize the Genoan explorer’s legacy may actually have a larger target in mind. Statues of Columbus and tributes to his achievements are in many ways proxies for the Western tradition of freedom, liberty and the rule of law. America had better protect Columbus and win this war. There is no one else to save the world next time around.

From the founding of America 241 years ago, those opposed to and threatened by America’s Founding Fathers’ noble aspirations of freedom for all and a government in which citizens and not kings or dictators decide who will represent them have waged fierce resistance.

From the Muslim Barbary Pirates who fought America’s first presidents (George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson) to today’s equally bellicose, supremacist, and fascist groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, all harbor the fantasy of destroying big bad America and replacing our Democratic Republic first with socialism and finally with communism. Predictably, they are fully supported by the leftists, progressives, communists, and Islamists among us.

The virulence of their ISIS-like demonstrations is because the real powers-that-be in the globalist hierarchy are choking with rage that everything they dreamed about and worked for and thought they achieved when they implanted the poseur “president” Barack Obama in office for a full eight years was shattered to smithereens when Donald J. Trump destroyed their other puppet, Hillary Clinton, in the presidential election of November 8, 2016.

And so the arch goal, the singular mission, indeed the psychotic obsession of these temper-tantrum infants-cum-political-activists is to destroy the man who embodies everything they are against:

Freedom
Democracy
A strong military
Secure borders
Capitalism
Low taxes
A thriving middle class
A conservative Supreme Court
Free speech
Gun rights
On and on and on…

Everything, in other words, that drives the megalomaniacal globalists, the one-world-government wonks, the deep-state traitors, and the lobbyists-enriched politicians stark raving mad!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. (I know. It feels more like 10 years ago.)https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/07/hey-lefties-where-are-your-pssyhats-now/

For days, Americans were subjected to an ongoing audio loop of a private conversation in 2005 between Donald Trump and the show’s co-host, Billy Bush. I don’t need to remind you what Trump said because anyone with a pulse can probably recite it verbatim. Some gals even have hats to commemorate Trump’s secretly recorded, indecent remarks.

The ensuing outrage should have been a clue of how intense, consuming, and exhausting the daily political climate would be under a Trump presidency. When the story broke in the Washington Post that Friday afternoon, the paper’s servers crashed due to the massive traffic to the site. The reaction from Democrats, women’s groups, celebrities and many Republicans was harsh, swift, and in some cases, way over the top. The man who was running for president against a woman married to a man who was a serial sexual harasser and assaulter, who seduced a young intern in the Oval Office when he was president and left a little reminder of one tryst on her blue dress, who was impeached for lying about his predatory behavior under oath, was compelled to publicly address his comments and apologize for the vulgar remarks. Melania Trump spoke about it. Some demanded that Trump withdraw from the campaign and several Republican rescinded their endorsements.

No group was more offended by Trump’s remarks, or so it seemed, than the newly minted Puritans of Hollywood. Celebrities went ballistic, firing off furious and anguished tweets about the Republican presidential candidate. Film producers, television actors, movie stars: everyone had something to say about Trump and many equated his remarks to sexual assault. (There is a good round-up of celeb tweets here.) And it wasn’t just about his fitness for office. Trump was the poster boy of powerful, rich men using their position to exploit and abuse women. He symbolized everything that is wrong with our white, patriarchal society.

Now, here we are, one year later, and the New York Times just published a bombshell expose about one of Hollywood’s most powerful men, Harvey Weinstein. The lecherous behavior of this disgusting man is one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets; no doubt the Times could have an ongoing series of articles about this movie-making, sexual predator. Like many Hollywood moguls, Weinstein parlayed his fortune and influence into political power, becoming a major Democratic party donor and fundraiser. Since 1990, he has contributed more than $1 million to Democratic PACs, officeholders, and candidates, many of whom must have been aware of Weinstein’s reputation as a first-rate vulture.

So, let’s take a little trip down Social Media Lane and see how our virtuous, high-minded celebs who wanted Trump charged with rape a year ago have reacted to the Weinstein story.

Do you hear the crickets? I sure do.

Come along then, and let us look at the Twitter timelines of some of Trump’s most indignant celebrity agitators such as Debra Messing, Chelsea Handler, Bette Midler and Lena Dunham to see if any are despairing over Weinstein’s vile behavior and the victims left in his wake. Messing? No. Handler? No. Midler? No, but she did tweet about “the deceit!! The hypocrisy! The nerve!!” of Republican Congressman Tim Murphy for asking his girlfriend to have an abortion. Lena Dunham? Oh yes, here’s something! Dunham applauds the Times reporter for breaking the story then says this about Weinstein’s victims:

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

For 55 years Americans have been expected to believe the “lone wolf” theory of murder. From President Kennedy’s shocking assassination to the savagery of radical Islamic terror and now the horrifying mass murder of concert goers in Las Vegas. In art and entertainment there is a term “suspension of disbelief” which is defined as the willingness to suspend one’s critical thinking faculties and believe the unbelievable. Suspension of disbelief is a participatory and voluntary experience of sacrificing logic for the sake of enjoyment.

Suspension of disbelief in the fifties happened when we went to the movies and allowed ourselves to believe that Clark Kent was Superman. Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter was fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.

Suspension of disbelief in 1963 was believing that President John F. Kennedy was killed by “lone wolf” Lee Harvey Oswald who shot a magic bullet that changed trajectories in mid-flight. Oswald was then conveniently murdered by terminally ill Jack Ruby. Skeptical Americans were very suspicious. After all, this was real life not the movies. The government doubled down on suspension of disbelief and the public was expected to believe the Warren Commission’s dubious conclusion that it was that “lone wolf” again shooting his magic bullet. The public was considered far too fragile to handle the truth. Suspension of disbelief applied to real life was rationalized as an altruistic act of kindness. Really?

On September 11, 2001 the United States was attacked by Islamic terrorists who hijacked passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon killing over 3,000 Americans. No one could seriously posit the lone wolf theory so instead Americans were expected to believe the lone group theory – Al-Qaeda was the first enemy group to be identified. As the Islamic terrorist movement expanded more groups were created and terrorist attacks that could not be linked to a specific group were dismissed as lone wolf attacks.

Over and over again experts in Islamic theology and men and women who had lived in Islamic countries told America that there are no lone wolves. Even the terrorists themselves announced that Islam is Islam. There is no moderate Islam. Islamic terrorism is inspired by the commandments in the Koran that unite jihadis in violence against all infidels. Islamic terrorism is one of several jihadi tactics being used to re-establish the Islamic caliphate and impose sharia law worldwide.

Western left-wing liberal politicians and the colluding mainstream media continue to insist that Radical Islamic terror is not an existential threat. Instead they insist upon public suspension of disbelief and the belief in the lone wolf theory of murder. Why? Because it works!

Although it strains credulity – people WANT to believe the lone wolf theory because it calms their fears and makes them FEEL safe and secure. The problem is that feelings are not facts. We are not living in a Hollywood movie that ends in two hours. Suspension of disbelief is dangerous in real life. Islamic terrorism is a real fact of 21st century life and is an existential threat to the American way.

It is an article of faith among the president’s most ardent supporters: The Trump dossier is a completely discredited piece of garbage. Hence, its relevance is limited to one matter and one matter alone: The dossier’s suspected use by the Obama administration (specifically, the Justice Department and the FBI) as a pretext to spy on the opposition party’s presidential campaign — a ruse that included cribbing the dossier’s sensational allegations in secret court applications for wiretap warrants.

It appears that this Trumpist tenet is going to be tested. The dossier that did so much to fuel the collusion controversy is assuming center stage once more.

The dispute over the 2016 election has stalemated. The Trump-deranged are convinced that the president is a Putin puppet; Trump boosters are just as certain that “collusion” is a fictional narrative dreamt up to delegitimize their man and explain away Hillary Clinton’s defeat. For a long time, I’ve thought the latter camp had the better argument. President Trump and the FBI director he fired, James Comey, may not agree on much, but they both say Comey provided repeated assurances that Trump was not a suspect in the FBI’s probe of Russia’s 2016 campaign meddling. It makes no sense that Comey would do that if there had been solid evidence of collusion between Trump and Putin.

That still seems incontestable. But neither do I believe Director Comey would have countenanced an investigation based on nothing — a “collusion” investigation conducted solely to camouflage political spying. Something is not right here. If we’re ever going to figure it out, the dossier is the roadmap.

So, is the article of faith true? If the Trump dossier is just a tissue of lies, why are the Justice Department and FBI, now controlled by Trump appointees, concealing information about it rather than anxiously volunteering disclosure?

If I had to bet on it, I’d wager that the dossier is like many reports compiled by investigative bodies whose motives are dubious and whose sources are of varying levels of credibility — similar to what you get after investigations by politicized congressional committees, law-enforcement agents who are less than first-rate, or private detectives who, lacking subpoena power, often rely on multiple hearsay. That is, I think the dossier will turn out to be a mixed bag of the true, the false, and the shades of gray in between.

Questions about the dossier are pressing for two reasons.

First, it was leaked this week that investigators working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed Christopher Steele. He is the former British spy who composed the so-called dossier during and after the 2016 campaign. At the time, Steele was a private contractor conducting political opposition research on behalf of Trump’s adversaries. The dossier, formatted to resemble official spy-agency intelligence reports, is a set of investigative summaries, based on Steele’s interviews with sources.

We don’t know the whole story at this point, but claims from Trump supporters that the dossier is a Clinton campaign project are overstated. Steele runs a private intelligence firm in London (Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd.) and was retained to dig up dirt on Trump by the Washington-based opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS. Fusion does a lot of work for the political Left, but it was originally hired by anti-Trump Republicans, not the Clinton campaign. Only later, when it was apparent that Trump would win the nomination, was the project handed off to Clinton backers.

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term still casually used to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the state that Orwell describes, all subjects are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successors Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin were at that time rolling tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush all resistance — enforcing the “Iron Curtain” over eight countries in Eastern Europe — the Soviet model of totalitarian control and subservience to Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking.

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

In 1984, Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future.” Orwell’s coining of the concepts and terms of “newspeak, doublethink and thought police” are what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while doublethink is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative. The analogs of “thought police” in 1984 are now the enforcers of political correctness seen in the mainstream media and college campuses across the country.

As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of newspeak and doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” Political correctness has the same goal and that’s why its adherents are so intolerant — seeking to shut down and silence people with whom they disagree on college campuses, clamoring for removal of historic statues and monuments so they can rewrite history and control the future, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume that because the press is not state-controlled in the U.S. there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother.

If Secretary of State Rex Tillerson resigned, how would anyone know?

He has become the nation’s least influential top diplomat in recent memory. His relationship with the president of the United States is strained at best, he has no philosophy or signature initiative, he has barely staffed his own department, and he’s alienated the foreign service. The former CEO of ExxonMobil has taken one of the power positions in the U.S. government and made it an afterthought.

Who knows the truth of the NBC story that he was close to quitting last summer over clashes with President Donald Trump? But Tillerson’s strange press availability swearing his loyalty to the president is not the sort of thing loyalists usually have to do.

The secretary of state dodged questions about whether he had, indeed, as NBC reported, called Trump a “moron” — almost certainly the first time in U.S. history a cabinet official has been asked about personally insulting the president he works for and apparently been unable, in good conscience, to deny it.

Tillerson doesn’t have an easy job. He works for a mercurial and bombastic boss who has a well-developed skill for humiliating his underlings. Even a practiced and slick diplomat — even Henry Kissinger; heck, even Cardinal Richelieu — would find the circumstances trying. But Tillerson is at sea.

He’s an accomplished man who ascended to the leadership of a quasi-state as CEO of ExxonMobil. As such, he had done plenty of work abroad. It was in business, though, not government. Making him secretary of state turns out to have been like selecting the head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to run a Fortune 500 company.

Usually establishmentarians have the advantage, if nothing else, of a great store of government experience. Brent Scowcroft devoted most of his adult life to public service; Tillerson devoted most of his adult life to ExxonMobil.

Unlike, say, James Mattis advising Trump on defense matters, this is not a professional guiding an amateur; it’s another amateur trying to school an amateur. Is it any wonder that it hasn’t gone well?

Recent Republican secretaries of state provide two models. There’s the Colin Powell approach of attending to the needs of “the building,” i.e., the civil service, and neglecting your relationship with the president. Then there’s the Condi Rice approach of tending to your relationship with the president and ignoring the building. Tillerson has done neither.

In a nationalist administration, he is a man without a country. He doesn’t have a constituency in the foreign-policy establishment, in the media, in Congress, or in the bureaucracy. He and his top aides are a thin layer spread atop the org chart to little effect.

Neither of the opposing dispensations in American foreign policy should feel vested in Tillerson. If you’re a liberal internationalist who wants Trump checked, you’d prefer someone better suited to the task. If you’re a Trumpist who wants Trump empowered to transform American foreign policy, you want someone who is in sympathy with that goal.

Las Vegas authorities now acknowledge mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have been “radicalized” before his bloody rampage Sunday at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival but they won’t say what species of radicalism the shooter may have embraced.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly disparage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a Muslim terrorist atrocity. Islamic State continues to claim responsibility for the massacre. The terrorist group also claims Paddock converted to Islam six months ago and refers to him by a nom de guerre, Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki. In Las Vegas Wednesday FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse said, “We have found no evidence to this point to indicate terrorism, but this is an ongoing investigation. We’re going to look at all avenues, not close any.”

Paddock may have been “radicalized unbeknownst to us,” Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said at a presser without elaborating. The reporters present for the statement did not bother to follow up. For much of the mainstream media, the fact that Paddock was a white male explained his violent rampage.

So what kind of radicalism could Lombardo have been thinking of?

The word radicalized “is quite often used to refer to Muslims who wage jihad,” Robert Spencer notes. So the sheriff “may be tacitly acknowledging that the Islamic State’s claims to be behind this attack are accurate.”

Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues, as Paddock did on the weekend. There was the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal.

Or Sheriff Lombardo may be implying Paddock was supportive of Antifa or the KKK. “In any case, [radicalized is] a strange word to throw out there and leave hanging,” Spencer adds.

It’s possible Paddock was a right-winger, but if so, he had an odd way of showing it. Targeting country music fans, who are largely Republican and conservative, seems like a strange way to advance a right-of-center cause.

Besides, in the United States, political violence is almost the exclusive province of the Left and Islamists.

Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter James T. Hodgkinson came close to assassinating House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a baseball practice in June. A little before then, Sanders supporter Jeremy Christian stabbed three men on a train in Oregon, killing two of them. Egged on by the Southern Poverty Law Center, left-wing gay rights supporter Floyd Lee Corkins II shot up the headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council in 2012.

For all we know at this point, Paddock may actually have been an angry left-winger lashing out at conservatives and Trump supporters. Some evidence does seem to point in that direction, and in the current atmosphere of visceral left-wing hatred towards anything and death threats being hurled at everything Republican or conservative, left-wing violence is becoming commonplace.