RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-criminal-protesters

Civic engagement and an appetite for protest are crucial to America’s success. Our Founders were keenly aware of this dynamic—it’s how our country gained independence—and secured the people’s right to assemble peaceably by ratifying the First Amendment.

Recent events within walking distance of my home have shown that some in our country are unfamiliar with, or do not care about, protesting peaceably. Perhaps they feel that their cause is so righteous that they can ignore norms and even laws. Perhaps they act criminally because they know that they are unlikely to be prosecuted. The answer probably falls somewhere in between, highlighting two serious issues in America: the decline of peaceful protest and the unequal enforcement of the law.

On July 24, during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, protesters filled the streets of Washington and laid waste to historic monuments outside of Union Station. The pro-Hamas activists vandalized a monument to Christopher Columbus and desecrated a replica Liberty Bell with phrases like “welcome to the intifada” and “anarchy.” They also assaulted police and removed the American flag from its pole, burning it and replacing it with a Palestinian flag.

It’s little surprise that they acted in this manner. Earlier this summer, a similar group of pro-Palestine demonstrators defaced Lafayette Square, just outside of the White House. The vandals graffitied anti-Semitic and hateful messages such as “death to Israel”  onto statues and walked away without consequence. Those sympathetic to the anti-Israel movement were doubtless emboldened by the lack of legal accountability that day and felt it would be permissible to deface other federal statues and public property on future occasions.

Their perception was partially vindicated in the days after the Union Station protest. While some were properly arrested at the demonstration, nearly a dozen have seen their charges dropped, and others were released from jail pending further court action. That is more enforcement action than occurred at the Lafayette Square protest, but not nearly enough to deter the next round of violent demonstrations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/everything_in_moderation_especially_government_power.html

Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.

One of the most important lessons in life is straightforward: everything in moderation.  If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.  If you drink too much, you’ll lose your wits.  If you play too much, no one will take you seriously.  Temperance is a remarkably sound philosophy for living well.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace. 

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_stranglehold_of_censorship.html

With Artificial Intelligence we have finally arrived in a world of 24/7 censorship, a place where thought itself can be molded, where whole societies can be pushed and pulled like taffy in any direction or shape desired. If you doubt that this is occurring it is only because you are unaware of the influence, not because it doesn’t exist. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end.

AI machine learning can control narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools can shape thought and action.

Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion. Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO ‘researchers’ like EIP, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars, these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.

State Department officials lobbied their counterparts in Europe to pass hate speech censorship laws that would boomerang back onto the U.S. A vague 2017 German law turned private social media companies into overzealous censors, with no judicial oversight or right to appeal. In 2022 the EU censorship law called the Digital Services Act created a frenzy of self-censorship by adding steep penalties for disinformation on platforms, all adjudicated by the government.

The UK has overtly criminalized “dangerous” thoughts and speech with fines and jail time penalties. The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress.” You can’t get much more vague and opinion-based than that. Who judges which ideas or speech are crimes? The police who investigate, and the Crown Prosecution Service. No chance that could be politicized or abused. The debate now is whether something said privately in one’s home should be criminalized. That anyone thinks that’s a good idea is frightening.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/07/30/democrats_vs_the_man_who_could_get_to_the_bottom_of_the_trump_shooting_1047928.html

After the evasive House testimony of now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s shortlived suggestion that Donald Trump may not have been hit by a bullet, one man alone may help allay Republican fears that the Biden administration will not conduct a forthright investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump last month: Joseph Cuffari.

The Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has already opened two investigations into the U.S. Secret Service, which is under the purview of the DHS, related to the agency’s handling of the July 13 shooting.

But some Republicans are concerned because, they say, Cuffari has been stonewalled by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on other internal examinations – including one that might have revealed Secret Service lapses that might have prevented the attempt on Trump’s life. 

Specifically, congressional sources tell RCI that Cuffari’s report, “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” has been on Mayorkas’ desk since at least April.

The report, according to Politico, will “cast light on a series of embarrassing security lapses for the agency.” And given some comparisons between Jan. 6 and July 13, the report might shed light on systemic issues that impacted both events.

For example, unanswered questions remain as to why the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage at The Ellipse outside the White House around noon on Jan. 6 amid reports of individuals with weapons in the vicinity – a question many Americans have about the July 13 assassination attempt. Law enforcement and spectators noted the presence of a suspicious individual, later identified as the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, at least a half hour before Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In addition, no one has explained how the Secret Service failed to notice an alleged pipe bomb found outside the Democrat National Committee DC office on Jan. 6 – while then Vice President-elect Harris was inside the building. Previous reporting by RCI shows multiple law enforcement officers, including one with a bomb-sniffing dog, walking past the bench where the device was found. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-evan-gershkovichs-freedomand

On March 29, 2023, a 31-year-old American named Evan Gershkovich was meeting a source at a steakhouse in the city of Yekaterinburg, east of the Ural Mountains. The Wall Street Journal reporter had planned to return to his apartment in Moscow, but he never got there: he was picked up by the FSB and dragged out of the restaurant with his shirt pulled over his head. Then, a few months later, the American son of Soviet émigrés was sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony on sham charges of espionage.

Today—491 days since his arrest—he is on a plane back to freedom.

His release was part of what the Journal called the “largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.” (You can read about the secret negotiations that led to the exchange in the WSJ.)

On one side of the swap: terrorists, killers, and spies, including, most infamously, Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen fighter in a Berlin park in 2019. There are eight such villains worthy of a Homeland episode currently en route to Russia.

On the other side: journalists, dissidents, and democratic activists. There are sixteen of them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/putin_s_prisoner_release_echoes_a_hostage_release_in_january_1981.html

Our adversaries fear strong presidents and will either try to keep them from office or yield to the inevitable. That may explain the events of the last two weeks.

On July 19, 2024, at the RNC convention, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President. During his speech, he said:

To the entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.”

There are more than 60 Americans being held hostage or wrongly detained around the world.

Thirteen days later, on August 01, 2024, this news broke:

The Biden administration has agreed to a prisoner exchange with Russia and is expected to soon secure the release of three American citizens imprisoned in Russia including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a senior administration official confirms. Others are believed to be part of the deal.

Boom! Before Trump assumes office, Russia decides to release its political prisoners.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_denigration_of_america_s_great_cities.html

Why have Democrat-run blue cities become such hellholes?

I recently traveled by car to Baltimore to seek medical testing at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. 

I was shocked to see the many empty and boarded-up buildings between the Inner Harbor area, the athletic arenas for baseball, and football and the Johns Hopkins Medical campus. 

We stayed at the hotel located at the north-east corner of the campus, which was very pleasant.  Hospital security staff advised us to avoid the subway system between the harbor and the campus and to not walk that distance, though it is only a little more than a mile. 

We used an Uber service on this advice between the hotel and the harbor. 

On the route I noticed beautiful old narrow row homes well maintained only blocks from deserted buildings. 

I grew up in New York City and lived in three of the boroughs over my lifetime.  I was aware of neighborhoods to avoid due to crime, but never felt unsafe during those times.  I routinely used the New York City subways without concern. 

That was before the COVID crisis left many with a sense of dread and fear. 

I went to college in St. Louis and visited Chicago many times during that period.  I had little fear then, though I avoided crime-ridden neighborhoods.  I have visited Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco many times over the years. 

But now I am much more cautious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sanitizing-violent-flag-burning-pro-hamas-protesters/

On the same day that President Joe Biden implied Jan. 6 was a darker day than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, leftist protesters fought and shoved police and burned the American flag near the Capitol. They pulled down the American flag and replaced it with the Palestinian flag. Some flew the Hamas flag and vandalized monuments with spray-painted slogans like “Hamas is comin’” and “I commend Hamas.”

The occasion was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of Congress. So how would our D.C.-riot-hating media treat this? Some largely pretended it did not exist (like The Wall Street Journal news pages). Even Netanyahu denouncing some protesters as “useful idiots” for Iran didn’t drag out more detail.

Others went into denial. On the “PBS NewsHour,” reporter Nick Schifrin asked former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) about Netanyahu calling protesters “useful idiots” for Iran. Malinowski replied, “If you look at the protesters who are flying the Hamas flag and burning the American flag —” Schifrin interrupted: “You mean they’re flying the Palestinian flag.” No, photographs showed Hamas flags were flown by someone. It’s funny how they avoid that.

On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” reporter Jennifer Ludden found protesters to denounce Biden as a “silent accomplice,” but insisted they were “largely peaceful.” Shoving cops and vandalizing monuments and burning flags were not “considered.”

On NBC, you could see vandalized monuments behind anchorman Lester Holt, but he and reporter Andrea Mitchell merely used the “thousands of protesters” to underline that Netanyahu was controversial, not that the protesters were in any way controversial. No flag-burning appeared, and no violence toward police was pointed out.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/this_is_still_our_country.html

It is a crazy time to be alive.  We have economic uncertainty, threats of war, political violence, and social turmoil.  An assassin nearly took President Trump’s life.  Puppet President Biden has been recycled for a younger model.  The Olympic Games openly mocks Christianity and celebrates transvestitism.  The EU, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. are all tiptoeing toward a little nuclear tête-à-tête.  Apprehension saturates the air.

Still, if you were a time-traveler from the future surveying the world as it unfolds today, you might whisper, “What an amazing time to be alive.”  That is a luxury that those who look back through history often enjoy.  Those living through chaos rarely write about trying times as marvelous adventures.  They are too busy struggling to survive.  

I do not wish to minimize the struggles that we will continue to experience, but I do want to take a small step back and recognize this moment for what it is: a hinge on the door of history opening up a new era for humanity.  The hallway we’ve been walking down for many decades has come to an end.  The door before us is shaking loudly as we fight for what reality will take shape on the other side.  Our situation is perilous and consequential.  

Future generations — buttressed by a misguided belief that their world was always foreordained — will dream about having been alive in our time, just as many of us have contemplated what it would have been like to fight in the trenches of WWI, endure the volatile interwar period, or beat back totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century.  Ours is not an easy time…but it is one ripe with significance.

Is this a contest between communism and capitalism?  Is it a war between West and East?  Is it a clash of civilizations, cultures, religions, and traditional beliefs?  It is all of that and more.  At its heart, the revolution that is picking up speed throughout the world centers on one essential conflict: state supremacy versus individual freedom.  

The war that has already begun is the mechanism for answering a straightforward question: how much liberty will each of us be “allowed” to possess, and how much control will governments maintain over their respective populations?  As with all wars, this one concerns the exercise and retention of power.  Somewhat uniquely, however, our war will decide whether we individual humans are ultimately sovereign arbiters over the direction of our personal lives, or whether we are disposable cogs in an all-powerful government machine.