RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/09/27/were-gonna-get-you-pro-hamas-mob-rampages-across-new-york-city-during-mass-protest/

Pro-Hamas activists stormed the streets of New York City on Thursday night, amassing in the hundreds to stage a demonstration outside the Loews Regency New York Hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying before addressing the United Nations the following morning.

“Netanyahu, we’re gonna get you,” the protesters, led by Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and its founder and leader Nerdeen Kiswani chanted, appearing to threaten the prime minister’s life. Flanked on all sides by dozens of New York City Police Department (NYPD) Bike Unit officers assigned to contain the demonstration, they waved Palestinian flags and signs calling for the destruction of Israel.

Later in the night, the protesters defied law enforcement officers’ orders to stay within the space they allowed, resulting in several arrests and additional charges for resisting arrest and obstructing justice. During the detainments, the protesters screamed expletives at officers, calling them “fascists,” “p—ssies,” and “pieces of sh—t.” Others, jamming their cell phone cameras into the thick of the confrontations, demanded to know the officers’ names, presumably to report them for misconduct.

In a statement WOL accused the NYPD of setting off a “cop riot to protect Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza.” It continued, “The NYPD incited another egregious riot against New Yorkers, arresting and injuring dozens. The NYPD’s violence and aggression exemplifies that they will continually prioritize protecting the forces of imperialism and zionism [sic] over the safety and rights of the people of NYC.” The group added that “two protesters remain in state custody.”

The demonstration shows that, nearly a year removed from Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, pro-Hamas extremists are as active as ever and intend to continue targeting major cities for mass disruptions and clashes with law enforcement.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=852c51fdb4

The answer to the question is that it’s not a close call. The Biden-Harris DOJ/FBI is far more corrupt.

For the latest evidence, consider the new federal criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Yesterday, a federal grand jury, acting at the behest of the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and FBI, handed down an indictment of Adams. The indictment was then released today. The full text can be found here.

Plenty in the Democrat Party media took the occasion to credit the work of the feds and jump all over Adams. As an example, the headline at Bloomberg News is “NYC Mayor Was Corrupt For Years, US Claims in Scathing Case.” Adams, on the other hand, responded by accusing the Biden-Harris DOJ/FBI of engaging in corrupt pay-back for his speaking out about the Biden-Harris immigration crisis and its impact on the City. Adams released a video with his response, available at the New York Post website. Excerpt:

Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics. . . . I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target — and a target I became.

Who has the better side of the case? I’m old enough to remember when if the feds handed up an indictment of a politician, you could be very sure that they had a real case. Those days are long gone. Today under Biden and Harris, the DOJ and FBI are very much in the business of corruptly using their power and resources to harass their political opponents, and jail them if possible.

Could that be what’s going on here? Let’s look at the indictment. I have read the whole thing carefully, and it is shockingly thin. There has been a full-bore federal investigation going on for many months, probably more than a year. Many millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been expended. Is this all they have come up with?

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-guilt-of-intellectuals/

Let the Hosannas ring forth: Fredric Jameson, one of the world’s most owlish producers of reader-proof prose of a Marxian bent, has just shuffled off his mortal coil, age 90.  The New York Times was quick off the mark with a fawning obituary. Duke University, where Jameson emitted his signature brand of academic “anti-capitalist” fog for many years, actually lowered the campus flags to commemorate the passing of this maven of Marxist muddle. (I put editorial quotation marks around “anti-capitalist” because, like so many of his academic brethren, Jameson railed against capitalism, “bourgeois individualism,” etc., while eagerly lapping up their benefits.) 

I last thought about Jameson in the 1990s when I wrote an essay about him for The New Criterion. I thought it might be worth reprising, with a few alterations, now that he has gone to his worker’s paradise. 

I began with an epigraph from the master himself: 

It is rather the essential “innocence” of intellectuals which is here in question: this private inner game of theoretical “convictions” and polemics against imaginary conceptual antagonists and mythic counterpositions, … of passionate private languages and private religions, which, entering the field of force of the real social world, take on a murderous and wholly unsuspected power.

—Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression

Among the stars that twinkled in the academic firmament of the 1990s and after, none twinkled more formidably than the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. Having taught at Harvard, Yale, and at various campuses of the University of California, Professor Jameson, who died on September 20, was for many years ensconced at Duke University — that favored perch for so many academic twinklers — where he was William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of both the Graduate Program in Literature and the Duke Center for Critical Theory. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/25/should-biden-stay-42-say-he-should-leave-office-before-his-term-ends-ii-tipp-poll/

Does the United States of America have a functioning president right now? That question isn’t meant to be provocative. Members of both major parties have noted that President Joe Biden seems to have gone AWOL from his official duties as the nation’s executive in chief. A large chunk of voters agree, saying they want Biden to leave office right away. 

In August’s I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,488 registered voters, taken from  July 31-Aug. 2, shortly after the Democratic Party forced Biden to step down as his party’s candidate, we asked voters the following question: “Which of the following do you believe is in the best interest of the country?” 

As we wrote then:

“Respondents were given four possible responses: ‘Biden should finish his term,’ ‘Biden should step down and hand over the presidency to Harris,’ ‘Biden should be removed from office using the 25th Amendment,’ and ‘not sure.’ “

“The answer? A small plurality of 48% said they wanted Biden to ‘finish his term,’ while 41% said they wanted him either to ‘step down’ (21%) or “be removed” through the 25th Amendment (20%). Another 12% weren’t sure.”

A month later, for our September poll of 1,582 adults (taken from Aug. 28-30), we asked the same question. There was virtually no change in the overall numbers.

A hefty 42% of voters still agree either that “Biden should step down and hand over the presidency to Harris” (21%) or “should be removed from office using the 25th Amendment” (20%). Another 11% say they’re “not sure” in the poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

https://www.thefire.org/news/i-grew-cuba-self-censorship-american-universities-all-too-familiar-me

Justo Antonio Triana is a senior at Syracuse University

Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

There is no room for controversy in a totalitarian state. If your thoughts do not align with the only permissible truth, you are an enemy. And no one wants to be the enemy of a repressive apparatus that is bigger and stronger than you. No one likes to feel powerless.

I remember one morning the school administrators summoned all the students to a meeting. They wanted to inform us that some American musicians were going to visit our high school in a few hours as part of a cultural exchange program. A student asked the principal if we could talk to the musicians. The principal replied, “Of course you’re free to talk to them, but beware that everything you say has consequences.” 

It was crystal clear to us what her words meant: If you dare to make us look bad, we will make you regret it.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.

When the search for truth is sacrificed for the sake of not being canceled, the outcome is a superficial and sterile education.

The difference is that in America it is not primarily administrators who enforce ideological homogeneity, but other students. Unlike in Cuba, the censorial administrator’s role in the U.S. is a surrogate one. They do not threaten ideological dissenters directly, but rather simply construct speech-chilling policies and enable the illiberal majority to silence students with dissenting views. Aware of the potential reputational and financial cost of publicly expressing a sincere rejection of free speech, university officials opt to quietly draft speech codes whose definition of “hate” is wider than the Pacific Ocean and encourage students to denounce each other or their professors over the slightest disagreement. 

In America, they let students do the dirty work of pressuring their peers into silence.

The result is a campus culture in which students and faculty know that everything they say “has consequences” and the accused are guilty until proven innocent. In this culture, self-censorship is the norm. While we might all agree that we should be empathetic to our peers, and that a bigot shouldn’t feel comfortable making others miserable, the current obsession with political correctness on campus is not fostering a culture of mutual understanding and respect. It’s fostering one of distrust and fear — a climate that is all too familiar to me.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com\

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”Benjamin Franklin: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”      Philadelphia, September 17, 1787

That exchange took place 237 years ago outside Independence Hall, where delegates had met to discuss weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation, as they pertained to the central government. It was recorded in the journal of Maryland delegate James McHenry (1753-1816), a journal now in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. (The Articles of Confederation, agreed to in 1777, were replaced a decade later by the United States Constitution, which provided for a stronger central government.)

Democrats have seized the expression “save democracy,” which means elect them, not Republicans who they argue would destroy democracy. They express concern of storm troopers led by Donald Trump who they say would tear down our democratic institutions. But might this be an example of projection?

Our Founders were concerned about despotism, including what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they constructed a Republic, with checks and balances, a federal government with three equal and independent branches – legislative, executive and judicial – to protect the rights of both the majority and the minority.

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, George Washington University law professor Jonathon Turley wrote: “In an October 2020 interview, Harvard law professor Michael Klarman laid out a plan for Democrats should they win the White House and both congressional chambers. They would enact ‘democracy-entrenching legislation.’ But what does that mean? They have called for the elimination of the Electoral College. They want to increase the size of the Supreme Court, and widen the reach of the federal bureaucracy through new administrative agencies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/suicidal_jews.html

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, and mental illness.

But how to explain group suicide?  There are numerous examples, going back to 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
In 1978, 918 Americans — including 276 children — ingested cyanide in the Peoples Temple, after being exhorted and compelled to do so by their cult leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana.
In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale — Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, whereas others — particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader” — simply followed orders.  In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

Currently, out of a worldwide population of eight billion people, there are about 15 million Jews — approximately seven million in Israel, almost seven million in the United States, and one million throughout the world.  This is, by any measure, a few grains of sand compared to the massive total population of the world.

According to U.S. voting patterns, Jews are overwhelmingly liberal — up to 80 percent — which means they vote in huge numbers for leftists like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.  These people’s staffs have comprised, almost exclusively, career antisemites, who have done everything in their power to effect anti-Israel policies like the Iran nuclear deal, knowing that the fanatical mission of the mullahs in Teheran was — and is to this day — to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate every Jew in existence.

As Karin McQuillan explained in “Leftist Jew Hatred Has Come to America,” “the Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives.  Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/23/our-so-called-experts-and-their-silly-group-speak-letters/

One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”

These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.

Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.

Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.

Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.

Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.

Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? Or as these ideologues lectured us as “experts”:

“We wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health.”

To convince the public to get behind the agendas of politicians—increasingly on the left—ideologues round up groups of politically kindred professors, researchers, retired officials, and former bureaucrats to show off their supposed expertise and convince the public by means of their “authority”.

Perhaps one of the most notorious examples was the “70 arms control and nuclear experts,” who in 2015 were gathered together by Obama subordinates to persuade Americans to support the administration’s bankrupt Iran Deal—the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).