RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-forgotten-11622231865?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

After the dismal Covid spring of 2020, many Americans are eager to resume their communal displays of gratitude for the people whose sacrifices have allowed us to live in freedom.

“Memorial Day Parade returns Monday,” notes a headline in The Telegraph newspaper of Alton, Ill. No rain is expected and the parade will follow its traditional route. It seems the town’s tradition proved too strong even for Covid. The Telegraph’s Ron DeBrock reports:

The Alton Memorial Day Parade is one of the longest consecutive Memorial Day parades in the nation, dating back to 1868.
Last year COVID-19 concerns prevented the East End Improvement Association from hosting the parade. A small group, however, decided to meet at Alton Middle School for an unofficial Memorial Day procession. Word of the plan spread, and nearly 40 decorated vehicles participated in the extemporaneous event.

This year, such events are returning to normal. On America’s East Coast, volunteers have once again planted 37,342 American flags on Boston Common to honor all those from Massachusetts who have given their lives defending our nation since the Revolutionary War. Last year only a thousand flags were planted as the state imposed significant Covid restrictions.

Charlie McKenna reports for the Boston Globe on the families of the fallen who have come to honor their dead:

Melida Arredondo, whose stepson Alex was killed in Iraq in 2004, said fellow Gold Star families who take in the display share a unique connection.
“Being out here seeing the other families – there’s a bond. You might not even know the other family’s first name or whatever, you just remember the kids,” she said.
She said it was a profound feeling “just to be here and honor each other as those who have lost their loved ones, honoring the troops who have lost their compañeros, and honoring those from Massachusetts who have died for liberty.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/31/we-need-more-statues-of-americas-heroic-saga-not-fewer/

President Joe Biden just nixed his predecessor’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.” That came as no surprise. Donald Trump had pitched it during the thick of last year’s presidential campaign. Then Trump issued executive orders to set up a task force for the monument and even to specify 244 candidates to be included in the new statuary garden, ranging from pivotal historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Tecumseh, and Harriet Tubman to modern-day celebrities such as Whitney Houston, Kobe Bryant, and Alex Trebek.

Historians understandably questioned the scattershot list. And the Biden team rarely treats the former president’s actions with anything other than contempt. But Trump’s proposal did represent the proper kind of response to current struggles about America’s past. We should focus on putting up new statues, not pulling down old ones.

More generally, our cultural institutions should be bringing our divided country together, not pushing us further apart. By all means, we should be adding new stories to the great American saga, rich and vibrant threads that make our national tapestry both more beautiful and more resilient. Instead, far too many authors, artists, and activists seem intent on tearing the fabric.

For example, more Americans should know about a hero who wasn’t on Trump’s list: Robert Smalls. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls made a daring escape from the port of Charleston during the Civil War — donning a captain’s uniform and piloting a ship full of other enslaved people past multiple Confederate checkpoints to the blockading Union fleet. After aiding the Union cause during the war, Smalls learned to read and write, helped integrate public transportation in Philadelphia, built businesses and schools, and began his political career, serving in both the South Carolina legislature and the U.S. Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/29/paul-ryans-impotent-appeal/

Of all the reactions to Paul Ryan’s speech Thursday at the Reagan Library in California, I thought the funniest was the one titled “Paul Ryan Begins to Re-emerge.” I found that idea funny because the speech I heard signaled the opposite: not burgeoning “re-emergence” on to the political stage but, on the contrary, an almost comical confirmation of obscurity. 

Ryan is a careful man, well-pressed, armed with all the best clichés, and utterly feckless. He salted his talk with plenty of gems calculated to appeal to conservatives. He appealed early and often to the ghost of Ronald Reagan—understandable given the auspices of his talk. And his speechwriters dropped all the right phrases about keeping government off the people’s backs, the evils of identity politics and political correctness, the desirability of low taxes, and economic prosperity. 

He was also careful to rehearse some of the achievements of the last four years, the years when his nemesis Donald Trump ran the roost. He was happy to associate himself with those triumphs. 

Nevertheless, sounding like an obbligato throughout Ryan’s talk was a warning that Republicans must not tether their fortunes to the wagon of Trumpism. He had a few nice words for populism, but then warned: 

If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality or of second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere. Voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence in mettle. They will not be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago. We win majorities by directing our loyalty and respect to voters and by staying faithful to the conservative principles that unite us.

A skeptical observer might wonder what Paul Ryan knows about how to “win majorities.” A skeptical observer who was also uncharitable might utter the name “Mitt Romney” at this point. I would not stoop so low. 

I think there are two takeaways from the former Republican House speaker’s emetic performance on Thursday. One concerns the species of conservatism for which he is a—well, I was going to say “spokesman,” but that is not quite right since he speaks for no one, really, except for himself. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “for which is an embodiment.”

What is that brand of conservatism? It is more an attitude than a definable philosophy. It is understated, well-polished, and clubbable. It is comfortable uttering nostrums that sound conservative while actually achieving nothing. It is what we might call “window-dressing conservatism.” Safe. Pampered. Epicene. Above all, it is adept at losing while covering those losses with a glaze marked “dignity.” “We lost, my fellow Americans, but at least we did it with our heads held high.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/antisemitism-is-an-attack-on-american-principles/

America and Jews owe each other a great debt. An attack on one is an attack on both.

The renowned British historian Paul Johnson has called anti-Semitism “a disease of the mind.” There seems to be no permanent cure for this disease. It has flared up again, not just in the usual international settings — in the United Nations General Assembly, for example — but much closer to home.

During the first week of the Israel–Hamas conflict, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) received 193 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Two weeks ago, Jews were attacked by gangs in New York City and Los Angeles, and synagogues were vandalized in Skokie, Tucson, and Salt Lake City.

Attacks on Jews, however, began long before the most recent clash between Israel and the Islamist terrorist organization of Hamas. In 2019, the ADL recorded more than 2,100 anti-Semitic acts, the highest number in the 40-year history of the organization’s report. The murderous rampages in synagogues in California and Pittsburgh, a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, the arson at the Portland Chabad Center for Jewish Life, the stabbing at the rabbi’s home during Chanukah in Monsey, N.Y., and brutal assaults on Hasidic men in Brooklyn — such incidents are no longer a rare occurrence.

Anti-Semitism is more than a hate crime. It represents a unique assault on America’s founding principles of equality and freedom. Despite the manifest violation of these principles from the start of the American experiment — the existence of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans — the United States created a civic culture that would regard Jews as equal citizens. Outside of Israel, America would become the most welcoming home to Jews of any nation in the world.

https://spectator.org/george-floyd-wokeism-religion/

Roughly one year ago, a religious Reformation occurred.

Over the years, I and many other writers have compared left-wing political “wokeness” to a religion — noting the philosophy’s endless rules, supposed martyrs, sacred spaces, debates about heresy, and even vision of the fallen world after original sin (“the System”). But it seems fair to say that a more aggressive and missionary version of the faith took root last year, following the unfortunate and symbolic death of George Floyd. A national movement rapidly coalesced around the idea of largely or completely defunding the police, while elected officials up to and including the president mouthed critical catchphrases about “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” American schools teaching full-on critical theory as part of the standard curriculum became a real possibility and the basis of a heated national debate. But crime statistics and other empirical data indicate that the promise of today’s new secular faith is a false one and that we should beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing when listening to its prophets.

Analogies between wokeness — Wokeism? — and conventional religion have been made many times, by authors ranging from John McWhorter on the political center-left over to Ann Coulter on the right. I myself wrote a well-received piece along these lines in The American Spectator last year. There are obviously more than a few similarities between faith of the old-timey variety and the modern idea that facially neutral “Systems” are all subtly structured to oppress minorities or the poor (“racism is the everyday”), and heroes are needed to fight this latent evil. The new ideology also boasts acclaimed martyrs such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, points of pure faith (such as the claim that racism must explain all performance gaps between groups), prophets ranging from Ibram X. Kendi to attorney Benjamin Crump, and a plentitude of holy places and “sacred spaces.” There is even a concept of original sin, which might be summed up as “privilege” — all people are born with a certain degree of advantage conferred on them by our corrupt systems, which the more fortunate must reject in order for moral purity to be possible.

While often made in fun, the wokeness-to-religion comparison holds up well and has been made for years. We have, however, witnessed a rapid and dramatic surge in the faith after the tragic police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Within the boundaries of the famous analogy, it seems fair to say Wokeism had a Judaism-to-Christianity or Catholicism-to-Protestantism-style Reformatory expansion following that day. Without being at all sarcastic, one can say that Floyd died in fairly classic fashion for a martyr, apparently being killed — however much other factors contributed to this outcome — under the knee of a modern-day centurion, a uniformed big-city police officer.

https://spectator.org/russia-hoax-obama/

“If I hadn’t already used up my 2021 quota of Orwell quotes — it’s been that kind of year — I might be tempted to conclude with this one: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” To be clear, Orwell never expected 1984 to be used as a training manual.”

Overlooked in Edward-Isaac Dovere’s much-discussed new book on the 2020 election, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, released May 25, is his credulous account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Relying heavily on Barack Obama’s key national security people, Dovere seems unaware that they have used him to launder their wretched history.

In Dovere’s retelling, the drama begins when CIA Director John Brennan arrives at a private White House lunch with a package of classified material. “The Russians weren’t just coming,” Dovere writes. “They were already here.” Dovere traces this hush-hush meeting, the first of many, to late July 2016. Being a “do-it-by-the-book” kind of guy, Obama did not want any of this information to leak.

Dovere is either unfamiliar with or fully indifferent to the serious research that has gone into debunking the Russia collusion hoax, a hoax orchestrated in large part by Dovere’s sources.

“We knew that this was a threat to our democracy,” Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice tells Dovere, “and it was potentially going to affect candidates up and down the ballot in every state and every party.” Had Mike Lindell said something this hyperbolic, at least 16 states would have banned MyPillows outright.

Dovere swallows it all. For him, there were “elements of the interference that everyone could see.” He cites — as though equal threats to the Republic — Trump’s joke about Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails, Trump’s (nonexistent) meddling in the Republican platform language about Ukraine, Wikileaks’ supposed mucking about in a South Florida campaign to benefit Roger Stone, and, oh yeah, the Steele dossier. Dovere describes the dossier as “the famous mishmash of rumors compiled by a British former espionage expert” and drops the subject completely.

Dovere repeatedly reminds the reader of the White House’s insistence on keeping the Russian intel tight. Brennan, however, was told to provide classified briefings to the four top congressional leaders. Reportedly, House Speaker Paul Ryan was all ears, telling Brennan, “As you know, I’m not a fan of Trump.” Unfortunately, this exchange seems all too believable.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/28/as-the-big-lie-about-sicknick-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/

On August 26, 2020, Kevin Phomma was arrested in Portland for assaulting several police officers with bear spray during that city’s nonstop siege by Antifa and Black Lives Matters protesters. Phomma and others surrounded the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, blocked traffic, and fought with law enforcement.

In a press release announcing his arrest, the Justice Department said, “Phomma doused several officers with pepper spray while they attempted to arrest him. Once in custody, officers discovered the pepper spray was in fact a powerful bear deterrent pepper spray.”

Phomma, 26, also had a three-inch dagger in a sheath strapped to his left hip. He was charged with a dozen counts ranging from civil disorder—a felony—to unlawful use of mace. He appears to contribute little to society except for his skills as a professional protester.

A few days after his arrest, Phomma was released on bail. His trial is still pending; his lawyers claim the civil disorder charge is “a vestige of opposition to civil rights for Black Americans.” (He does not appear to be black.)

While Phomma roams free, acting as the aggrieved party rather than the aggressor, the two men who allegedly sprayed officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant on January 6 are not so lucky.

George Tanios and Julian Khater were arrested in March and accused of “attacking” Sicknick with a chemical spray; the indictment, not coincidentally, was filed just a few weeks after the initial account of Sicknick’s death—the murder-by-fire-extinguisher story—was exposed as a lie.

Desperate to sustain the lie that a police officer was killed by bloodthirsty Trump cultists on January 6, the media and Democrats quickly pivoted to the idea Sicknick died from an allergic reaction to the bear spray. Tanios and Khater, who traveled together to hear Donald Trump’s speech that day, face four charges of using and carrying the “dangerous and deadly weapon” on January 6.

Unlike Kevin Phomma, one charge filed against Tanios and Khater is “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.” Unlike Phomma and his accomplices, Tanios and Khater also are charged with conspiracy for allegedly pre-planning the assault on a federal officer.

Also unlike Phomma, neither man has been able to post bail; a federal judge last month agreed with Joe Biden’s Justice Department to keep the pair behind bars awaiting trial. D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, a Reagan appointee, even rejected a $15 million bond package backed by 16 relatives of Julian Khater—an amount three times higher than the court-ordered bail for Harvey Weinstein, as one reporter noted.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/28/a-terrifying-omen-for-america-under-biden-becomes-even-worse-n1450432

A new portent of doom for the U.S. economy and the Democrats led by President Joe Biden hit the presses on Friday — a key measure of inflation in the month of April proved worse than expected. This, combined with persistently high unemployment numbers coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, bodes ill for the recovery and should jolt Americans out of their complacency with the Biden administration’s profligate spending.

The core personal consumption expenditures index, which officials at the Federal Reserve consider to be the best indicator of inflation, rose 3.1 percent in April, above the 2.9 percent that economists predicted, the Commerce Department reported on Friday, CNBC reported. In March, the index only rose 1.9 percent.

The index captures more price movements across a variety of goods and services and is generally considered a wider-ranging measure for inflation than the Labor Department’s consumer price index, which accelerated 4.2 percent last month.

The Fed considers 2 percent to be healthy, although it will allow the price index to grow in the interest of promoting full employment. Unfortunately, unemployment remained above 6 percent in April despite economists predicting that it would dip below 6 percent.

This persistent unemployment should not surprise Americans who are familiar with the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion blue pork bill masquerading as a “COVID-19 relief” stimulus. Only 8.6 percent of the funding went directly to combatting the pandemic, while hundreds of billions went to blue-state bailouts. The bill also sent $1,400 checks to individuals, and extended the $400/week “enhanced” unemployment benefits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jews-cant-let-the-u-s-turn-into-europe/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

A few days ago, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sent extra state patrols to Jewish neighborhoods after a rash of attacks, including the beating of a man by a mob in midtown, a brick flying through the windows of a kosher pizza store, and “protesters” spitting at and threatening restaurant patrons. I had initially missed the story. Since anti-Jewish attacks in Brooklyn aren’t primarily the work of white supremacists, the incidents don’t garner widespread attention.

No matter. I’d suggest Jews go out and arm themselves to deter these kinds of assaults, but, of course, New York makes that extraordinarily difficult. And we shouldn’t exaggerate the circumstances — hate crimes are still rare and the United States is perhaps the safest place for Jews.

That said, it would be a tragedy if we were on a European trajectory. There, the kinds of lies and smears now being normalized and spread by likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and other progressives on the floor of Congress have manifested in harassment and violence against Jews. Nearly a quarter of the French, for instance, believe in some Jewish conspiracy theories. Nearly half of the French say that Zionism is a plot for world domination. Much like American progressives, the European Union helps fuel this animosity by singling out the Jewish state for endless and nearly exclusive reprimand, while at the same time ignoring the atrocities around the world.

In Europe, few Jewish organizations are left to push back against these currents. Indeed, in the United States, Jewish organizations — the cowardly ADL and others — also largely exist to mollify leftist partisans and crusade for progressive causes. These places are populated by people who exhibit bravery by putting triple parentheses around their Twitter handles; the kind of people who work harder to cancel Tucker Carlson than expose the spread of blood libels by elected officials. These are the kind of people who propose American Jews take off your yarmulkes, as they must in Paris suburbs. “It pains me to say this,” Aaron Keyak, Joe Biden’s head of Jewish engagement during the campaign and transition, recently tweeted, “but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david. (Obviously, if you can, ask your rabbi first.)” In 2020, Keyak blamed Trump for anti-Semitic attacks, saying, “We see how Trump has been remarkably weak on anti-Semitism and has endangered Jews by making us all less safe.” Today, he has no idea why it’s happening.