RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/civil-military-divide-media-forever-wars.html

After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation. But with the military’s involvement in Afghanistan drawing to its end and American troops still at risk in Iraq, the divide between the civilian and military worlds is wider than ever.

My father served in Iraq during the Gulf War, and I served in the same country during the war against ISIS 25 years later, an example of how military service is becoming more associated with familial ties, and ever more separate from the general population. An ever-smaller portion of the U.S. population, not to mention U.S. politicians, has any experience with military personnel. As the prospect of the end of our forever wars draws nearer, it’s time for the nation and its armed forces to reassess their relationships with each other. A stronger civil-military relationship may prevent our involvement in future unwinnable wars, and it may also help prevent needless deaths caused by an insular military culture during peacetime. In light of recent political events, strengthened ties can also prevent the horrifying prospect of our troops being used by political actors against our own citizens.

The only way to accomplish this shift in relations is through the American public being properly informed.

Most Americans support the military, yet don’t know what it actually does. This isn’t just a failure on their part; the Defense Department itself bears a large responsibility for its estrangement from the American public. While serving as a journalist in the Army, I often found that our own efforts at outreach were hindered by cultural norms and procedures that rewarded minimizing contact with the outside world. Media organizations were kept at arm’s length, and all news releases (including mine) were strenuously reviewed to ensure that they were on message. Concrete steps must be taken to engage in dialogue with citizens not just outside of military bases, but at college campuses, in areas that usually do not draw recruits, in places where the military may not be liked. Traditionally, when it comes to public affairs, military doctrine emphasizes persuasion, but the goal of this engagement with the public should be to provide information that allows citizens to civically engage with our government about the use of and policies relevant to armed service members.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/14/dr-faucis-emails-tell-the-story-of-panic-lies-and-a-possible-cover-up/

Fauci knew COVID-19 likely came from the Wuhan lab. He knew the virus ‘looked engineered.’ And he knew all this on February 1, 2020.

Recently released e-mails show that Dr. Anthony Fauci knew key facts about the origins of COVID-19 in January 2020. But at that critical time, when the country was first learning about the virus, Dr. Fauci chose not to share the facts with Americans. Instead, he acted to conceal them.

On January 31, 2020, at 10:32 p.m., Dr. Fauci received an email from British researcher, Dr. Kristian Andersen. Dr. Andersen has received millions of dollars in grants from the NIH. In the email, he warned Dr. Fauci:

[O]ne has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson] and myself all find the genome inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

Two hours later, at 12:29 a.m. on February 1, Dr. Fauci emailed his long-time deputy, Dr. Hugh Auchincloss. In the email, Dr. Fauci attached a paper written by Dr. Ralph Baric and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi – the so-called “bat woman” from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The paper highlighted taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses conducted by the WIV. Dr. Fauci told Dr. Auchincloss:

It is essential that we speak this [morning]. Keep your cell phone on . . . read this paper . . . you will have tasks today that must be done.

Urgency. Intensity.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/declining-navy-culture-is-a-cautionary?token

“Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we’ll survive a fight with the Chinese navy.”

“It’s criminal. They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we’ll all bleed the same color.”

These are the words of an active duty lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. They were recorded in a disturbing new report conducted by retired officers Lieutenant General Robert E. Schmidle of the U.S. Marine Corps, and Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery of the U.S. Navy, at the direction of Republican Senator Tom Cotton and Representatives Jim Banks, Dan Crenshaw, and Mike Gallagher on the apparently flagging fighting culture of the Navy’s surface fleet.

The lieutenant’s words capture the looming disaster to American life and limb posed by the cult of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion conquering every aspect of society—including our national security and intelligence apparatus—as the Woke anti-cultural revolution rages on.

They are particularly poignant because they come at a time when America faces its most formidable foreign adversary since the Soviet Union—a Communist China aggressively pursuing global dominance, armed with a military that increasingly rivals and in some areas eclipses our own, led by a navy boasting a fleet larger than ours that is central to its regional imperial ambitions.

As a recent report Congressional Research Service Report notes:

“China’s navy is viewed as posing a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s ability to achieve and maintain wartime control of blue-water ocean areas in the Western Pacific—the first such challenge the U.S. Navy has faced since the end of the Cold War—and forms a key element of a Chinese challenge to the long-standing status of the United States as the leading military power in the Western Pacific. Some U.S. observers are expressing concern or alarm regarding the pace of China’s naval shipbuilding effort, particularly for building larger surface ships, and resulting trend lines regarding the relative sizes China’s navy and the U.S. Navy.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-7-13-the-essence-of-socialism-is-declining-productivity

In our freedom-based economic system, we are accustomed to economic growth of a percent or two or three every year. How does that happen? Every person with a private business quickly catches on that they can make a little more money if they can just figure out how to make the product a little better, or a little more efficiently, or with slightly less input material or labor. Millions of people working independently on this project in the aggregate deliver a little economic growth most every year.

Meanwhile, socialism follows the incentive system of the bureaucracy. If you are the business manager, your superior in the central planning bureau headquarters has no idea whether the product you are making is any good or not. Your way to get ahead is to convince that guy that you need a bigger budget and more staff to accomplish your mission. Each year you use more people and more materials to produce less and lower quality product. In the aggregate, the economy is shrinking, although that tends to get hidden for decades in fraudulent economic statistics, until it becomes too obvious to conceal. Like, for example, when starvation sets in on a mass scale.

You would think it would be almost impossible in today’s world for mass food shortages and starvation to happen in an entire country. After all, all a government needs to do to provide plenty of food for everyone is to allow private businesses to operate in the fields of food production and distribution. Just get out of the way, and the private sector will take care of it, and the people will have plenty to eat. And yet examples of mass food shortages and even starvation are not difficult to find. Funny, but it’s always the usual (socialist) suspects:

Cuba

Likely you have read about the mass protests in Cuba over the past couple of days, and about the widespread calls for “freedom” among the people. But then, Cuba has been under the thumb of the same dictatorship for about 60 years, with the same lack of freedom all that time, and without much in the way of these mass protests. So why now?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/13/voter-integrity-group-in-georgia-says-2020-election-in-fulton-county-riddled-with-massive-errors-and-provable-fraud/

The 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia was “riddled with massive errors and provable fraud,” a voter integrity group alleged Tuesday reviewing ballot data.

Data analysts working for VoterGA, a voter integrity non-profit led by co-founder Garland Favorito, have determined that an astounding 923 of 1539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes incorrectly
reported in Fulton’s official November 3rd 2020 results.

The mail-in ballot images—like the ones seen in the video below—were made public after petitioners won a court order on April 13. An analyst showed how ballots were re-fed into the system, and counted again.

As American Greatness reported last week, the Keystone State is preparing to launch a forensic audit of its own highly suspect 2020 election. Former President Donald Trump said in a recent interview that it would be “up to the public” to decide what happens if forensic audits in multiple battleground states prove that the election was stolen.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/old-moral-idiocy-anti-patriotism-bruce-thornton/

This year’s Fourth of July celebrations brought out the predictable snarky dudgeon of the “woke” left. Major propaganda organs like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR featured stories trashing the Statue of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and the displaying and waving of the flag, to the Left a fascist dog-whistle.

For the “woke,” celebrating patriotism on Independence Day is dangerous low-brow kitsch at best, and an equivalent of a Nazi Nuremberg Party Rally at worst. Such attitudes bespeak not a cosmopolitan, sophisticated intellect, but rather a shameless moral idiocy, as well as a mind filled with ideological clichés and stale received wisdom.

More important, despising one’s own country is dangerous, for the Marxist bacillus is still infecting our body politic and attacking patriotism, which is the immune system of a healthy state that can resist a murderous ideology.

Hatred of America both domestic and foreign reflects Marxists’ long resentment of the U.S. and its success in ushering their biggest achievement, the Soviet Union, into the trash-can of history. But this obvious superiority of capitalism to Marxism was obvious decades before the Soviet Union’s collapse. As French political philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists have “a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.” In other words, it was the capitalist U.S. that delivered prosperity and equality, while the Marxist U.S.S.R. produced misery and corpses.

But historical failure could not dampen Marxism’s appeal, which fed Western anti-patriotism even before the early 20th century. Whether from genteel Fabian socialists, or hardcore communists activists, disillusionment with, and disaffection from one’s nation was the mark of sophistication and progress. Attacks on patriotism, moreover, had already followed the growing dislike of the British Empire, a distaste that started accelerating after the gruesome Boer War (1899-1902). The industrialized carnage of World War I further eroded pride in, and affection for one’s own country. Both causes, anti-imperialism and Marxism, were combined in Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which substituted colonial subjects for the industrial proletariat that had become middle class instead of violent revolutionaries.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/blinken_invites_un_racism_investigators_to_inspect_the_us.html

Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has invited the United Nations’s racism investigators to come inspect the U.S.

According to Reuters:

The U.S. State Department has invited U.N. experts who investigate racism and minority issues to conduct an official visit to the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday.

“Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record; rather, they should acknowledge it with the intent to improve,” Blinken said in a statement.

“I urge all U.N. member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” he said.

Blinken said the United States welcomed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption on Tuesday of a resolution to address systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the context of law enforcement.

That’ll fix ‘er. They’ll get to the bottom of all this systemic racism in the U.S. and hold up America’s sins for all to see. We can’t do this ourselves. So, Blinken’s called the United Nations in.

None of these members of the vaunted United Nations Human Rights Council involved in this resolution that led to this “inspection” would have an agenda, would they? Who are their members?

According to the UN, they’re:

Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

They wouldn’t have a need to cut the U.S. down a peg, now would they? They wouldn’t profit from holding up the U.S. as a racist hellhole and passing some cockamamie resolution condemning the states or issuing a stern warning to us for the cameras, now would they?

Who better to judge us than communist Cuba? Let’s have China weigh in on U.S. human rights. Pakistan will judge the U.S. best. So will Russia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/shocking_report_finds_navy_far_more_interested_in_diversity_than_winning_wars.html

The signs are clear that the United States Navy is in crisis. A series of ship disasters, including the scrapping of ¾ billion dollar carrier, The Bonhomme Richard, after a fire, and the fatal seaborne collision of the guided missile destroyer Fitzgerald that killed 7 sailors have revealed problems with training and readiness.

China, which now has more ships in its navy than we do, is boasting of having “chased” as US warship out of disputed waters. The AP reports:

China’s military said it chased a U.S. warship out of a disputed area of the South China Sea on Monday after Washington warned an attack on the Philippines might activate a mutual defense treaty.

Beijing affirmed its claims to portions of the sea that also are claimed by Southeast Asia governments. It rejected the Biden administration’s declaration of support Sunday for an international tribunal ruling in favor of the Philippines that threw out most of them.

China is increasingly assertive about pressing its territorial claims, which are fueling tension with neighbors including Japan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The People’s Liberation Army said it sent ships and planes after the U.S.S. Benfold entered waters claimed by Beijing around the Paracel Islands.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/when_woke_is_more_sacred_than_old_glory.html

On my desk is a framed political cartoon with the caption: “Burning the American Flag is a form of free speech? Try burning a rainbow flag and see if that too is considered a form of free speech?” You could replace “rainbow flag” with “BLM flag,” or even “Antifa flag.” The cartoon lances the recent rise in free-speech hypocrisy that promptly abandons the First Amendment and drums up hysterical charges of “hate speech” when certain sacred cows du jour are so much as mildly criticized.

In the Left’s campaign to “fundamentally transform” America and rid it of soi-disant racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other perceived ills, certain symbols — the American flag, and a panoply of images of western culture — have been isolated as representative of “the white patriarchy,” deserving of derision and destruction. Therefore, it has become perfectly acceptable to desecrate them. At the same time, it has become hateful to even give a disapproving look to banners or murals representing the LGBTQ+, militant black groups, or anything remotely leftist. “Woke” symbols are untouchable; free speech be damned.

Quite a few incidents point to this bizarre dual trend, which aims to crush American ideals underfoot and ridicule — even eradicate — the patriotic emotions true Americans have honestly felt and nurtured in their hearts while forcing them by propaganda and law to embrace ideas their hearts have always militated against. The U.S. flag has been a symbol of freedom and justice for over 225 years and represents the American people in vibrant plurality: e pluribus unum, not one constituency or point of view. It also honors all those who fought and died to preserve our freedom and liberty. So, it has obviously been a prime target of America’s enemies within.

On Memorial Day in 2016, veteran Robert Rosebrock was criminally charged for displaying two four-by-six American flags on the fence outside a Veteran Affairs facility in West Los Angeles and faced up to six months in jail. Says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which successfully defended Rosebrock, “Why in the world would the feds prosecute a 74-year-old veteran over the placement of two small American flags at the entrance to a park honoring veterans on Memorial Day?”

In 2019, air force veteran Robert Huey was denied permission by his homeowners association (HOA) to fly an American flag at his residence in South Carolina. Huey, who is suing the HOA, had researched the association’s rules before buying the house and found no prohibitions against displaying the American flag. He is now fighting a case for the freedom to broadcast his love for the country.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-adl-chiefs-disingenuous-epiphany-about-left-wing-anti-semitism/

(July 13, 2021 / JNS) It’s a sad day when the head of the Anti-Defamation League receives accolades for acknowledging that anti-Semitism “also” hails from the left. If the person in question had been living in a cave until last week—when he published an op-ed in Newsweek called “It’s Time to Admit It: The Left Has an Anti-Semitism Problem”—he might be excused for having an epiphany about a phenomenon that has been obvious for decades.
But Jonathan Greenblatt hasn’t been in isolation for the past six years, when he replaced Abraham Foxman as CEO of the Jewish organization, established in 1913 by B’nai B’rith. On the contrary, he’s been as active a participant in American political culture throughout his current tenure as he was during his term in the White House as special assistant to former President Barack Obama.

It is thus that Jews across the spectrum viewed the ADL’s announcement in November 2014 that he would be taking over the reins from Foxman in July 2015 as “dramatic.” Unlike Foxman, a liberal but an indefatigable defender of Israel, Greenblatt’s love for the Jewish state was and still is conditional on its policies—particularly those of the government under former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
His attitude is par for an ardent Democrat whose subsequent loathing for former President Donald Trump made his feelings about Netanyahu pale in comparison. Nor was his mission to transform the ADL into an NGO devoted to a distorted version of tikkun olam, a Jewish concept of making the world a better place that morphed over the years into a branch of “woke-ism” that bears no resemblance to its original meaning.
Nor was combating the globe’s evils the founding purpose of the ADL. That emerged during the trial of American Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, who was lynched by an angry mob two years after he was wrongly convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta.
At the time, the severe anti-Semitism that gripped the U.S. South emanated particularly from white racists who hated Jews and blacks in equal measure. They saw the Jewish community and members of the press mobilize on behalf of Frank as proof that Jews control the world and certainly the media.
The irony is inescapable here since Frank’s key champion was The New York Times. And the idea behind the ADL was that when anti-Semitism is allowed to thrive, the rest of society is in trouble—not that Jew-hatred is one among many forms of racism.

What a difference a century makes.

Today, it’s not white supremacists who pose a threat to Jews in particular and society as a whole, but rather movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Students for Justice in Palestine. There’s a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with the identity of the targets of abhorrent positions and behavior. It is, rather, the fact that the former is on the fringe, while the latter is completely mainstream.

Greenblatt’s piece on Thursday, then, was more deserving of ridicule than praise.