RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oh-yeah-they-tried-to-kill-the-president-i-forgot-about-that/

You might think that an attempt to shoot the president – okay, the former president and likely the next one, but you know what I mean – would be a big deal. And you might think that two attempts to shoot him in the space of a couple of months might be an even bigger deal. But you would be wrong. They are no deal at all, and that’s not a good thing. Not at all.

We are on a very scary path, and it’s unclear that there is a turn-off we can take that brings us someplace good.

What is happening now is unprecedented. I was a junior in high school when that rabid and very misguided Jodie Foster fanboy shot President Reagan. A few years before, a couple of Charles Manson bimbettes had made feeble attempts to murder Gerald Ford, but Hinckley managed to shoot Rawhide as well as three others. That happened while I was a high school junior. I am not sure if school let out or if we just watched it in class, but that was a huge deal. And it remained a huge deal for a while.

Now, one scuzz wounds the president and a couple of other people, plus kills Corey Competore, and it’s no biggie. Next, some Harris-Walz voter tried to ambush Trump on the fairway. And is this a huge story? Nah. They did not even interrupt the sportsball games for a special report. I mean, sure, an assassination attempt is no pet-noshing narrative. It’s just a couple of committed Democrats trying to change the course of American history with guns because Orange Man Bad.

And the regime media is okay with that. The reaction to Attempt No. 1 was simply muted as if they were measuring their words to provide plausible deniability that they thought the shooting was a bad thing for reasons beyond the fact that it gave the courageous candidate an iconic photograph and more combat time than the pseudo-sergeant major Dem VP nominee. But after Attempt No. 2, the regime media’s journohacks did not even try to pretend. They went right into their bullSchiff narrative. Why, Trump being mean to illegal aliens for dining on Fido means he brought it on himself. Stop hitting yourself, Donald. You were asking for it with that short skirt.

But beneath the garbage narrative to try to turn yet another Democrat murder freak into a MAGA NRA GOP White Nationalist Christian Guy, you could detect something else.

Disappointment. It was as if the unspoken question was not “How can we stop our allies from trying to murder our political opponents?” and was, instead, “Can’t anybody here shoot straight?”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/stirring-monument-to-americas-warriors

Sabin Howard’s engrossing 38-figure, high-relief sculpture—the centerpiece of Washington’s new National World War I Memorial, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of the White House and Treasury Department—takes a cinematic approach to sculptural narrative. It commemorates a civilization-transforming conflict in which 116,516 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded. The several scenes in what Howard calls his “movie in bronze,” portraying a soldier’s departure from home and family for war and its horrors and then his return, unfold from left to right in a work nearly 60 feet wide.

Entitled A Soldier’s Journey, the sculpture is noteworthy for several reasons. Its kinetic design, with changing tempos and moods and a range of character types, seems to resonate with visitors. In remarks at the memorial’s inauguration on September 13, Howard said that his sculpture heralds “an American cultural Renaissance.” There’s also a polemical edge to his public discourse, as when he told the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent podcast interview that the “art world” treats the public the way the government does.

Credit: Photo Courtesy of Catesby Leigh

A Soldier’s Journey appears at a time of growing aversion to elite arrogance and incompetence of the kind that foisted on the public Frank Gehry’s bloviated, $150 million Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial (2021), with its rigid, lifeless statuary groups and enormous, unfathomable background tableau of metallic squiggles supposedly resembling the Pointe du Hoc. Back in 2018, Howard and the World War I memorial’s young architect, Joseph Weishaar, confronted such art-world arrogance when their project ran into headwinds at the federal Commission of Fine Arts, one of the guilty parties in the Ike memorial fiasco. The $44 million World War I memorial, mostly paid for with private funds, could wind up fortifying public opposition to boondoggles like Gehry’s, for which the American taxpayer got stuck with the bill.

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.