RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/lionel-trillings-warning

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling published a collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination. It contained a presciently devastating critique of modern American liberalism’s grasp of reality. Liberalism, he wrote, “drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination”:

The world is a complex and unexpected and terrible place. . . . It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. . . . We must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive.

By “imagination,” Trilling didn’t mean the ability to invent. He meant the ability to resist simplistic, reductive, and morally gratifying explanations of reality and to see the painfully immense complexity of truth and perspective that is at the heart of life.

Consider a few test cases of the efficacy of the liberal imagination. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently wrote in a Tweet that a grocery store chain allowing its vaccinated employees not to use masks so long as they wore a logo on their shirts was “just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” Denunciations of Greene for making such an unhinged analogy swiftly followed. Yet with a little complexity, a little modulation, and a little context, you might arrive at the conclusion that Greene is crazy like the proverbial fox. Perhaps she intuits that in American politics, celebrity almost guarantees success as a political candidate, and that notoriety is the quickest route to celebrity. But why ruin all the fun? Greene and her adversaries are linked arm in arm in a thrilling race to the bottom.

There are Holocaust analogies, and then there are Holocaust analogies. Recently, CNN fired Rick Santorum, the network’s token conservative pundit, for saying elsewhere that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that its colonists and settlers “birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Callous? Sure, but Santorum was not denying American Indians’ death and destruction at the hands of white settlers. He was carelessly stating facts that were nevertheless historically accurate—America was founded on Judeo-Christian values; and American culture doesn’t owe much to Native American culture, if by “culture” he meant the organized expression of thought and feeling.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-second-thoughts-about-voting-for-joe-biden

It was well known during the presidential campaign that many Biden voters were happier about voting against Donald Trump than voting for Joe Biden. A Monmouth University poll taken a couple of weeks after the election found that 57 percent of Biden voters reported being happy with his victory, while 73 percent said they were happy that Trump lost. So a significant number of them voted more against Trump than for Biden.

That sense of ambivalence about Biden has lasted into his presidency. A new Fox News poll asked the question, “Are you satisfied with how you voted in the 2020 presidential election, or do you wish you had voted differently?” Ninety-one percent of Biden voters said they were satisfied. Among Democrats, 89 percent said they were satisfied. Of people who call themselves liberals, 85 percent were satisfied. While those numbers are high, they are still lower than the last two winning candidates in the early months of their presidencies. In April 2017, 97 percent of Trump voters said they were satisfied with their vote, while in April 2009, 93 percent of Obama voters said they were satisfied.

There appears to be a growing concern among some voters that Biden is not governing the way he campaigned. During his run for the White House, Biden presented himself as a “centrist,” and much media coverage happily went along. But once in office, Biden has pushed massive spending proposals to remake America. He has not uttered a word of protest when admiring media commentators compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Democrats who succeeded in passing massive proposals to remake America.

In short, Biden is pushing more change than some of his voters want. The change they wanted was to get rid of Trump, not elect a new FDR.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2021/05/28/the-oldest-hatred-now-fulminates-and-flourishes-at-1600/

In February, not two weeks into the, ahem, presidency of Joe Biden, I described in my article, “Joe’s Jews,” the appointments he made of 11 longtime Jew haters and Israel loathers to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

A month later, in my article “More about Joe and the Jews,” I described 12 more Jew haters and Israel loathers that Joe appointed to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

There have been many other alarmingly similar appointments since then, making it clear to even the most casual observer that the Biden White House has a particularly hostile––even hateful––attitude toward Jews and their ancient homeland Israel, combined with a perverse infatuation with and allegiance to any group or individual intent on destroying the Jewish state.

There is no doubt that Biden’s presence in the Oval Office has been interpreted by these career haters and organized thugs as an unmistakable nod of approval to continue and even expand on the tsunami of anti-Semitism now sweeping the entire globe––from the contamination of most American colleges and universities to brutal physical assaults of Jews  in the streets of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and around the world––a phenomenon writer Victor Rosenthal elaborates upon in chilling detail––to condemnation of Israel by the Irish parliament and other governments to the racist obscenities vomited out routinely by Democrat members of the U.S. Congress. 

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

In fact, Joe Biden and his entire coterie/staff/cabinet/appointees of left-wing, blatantly anti-Semitic radicals, demonstrate their noxious racism on a daily basis, notwithstanding his boilerplate pronouncements about support for Israel…at the exact same time he embraces, applauds and funds Israel’s mortal enemies. Want proof? Here is the very very short list:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/just_who_made_obamas_birth_certificate_an_issue.html

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology.

According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton’s loss “to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker.”  Dovere traced Obama’s grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue.

Obama, writes Dovere, “would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he’d had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011.”

Dovere errs on several counts.  Trump was not the one who turned the birth certificate into an issue.  Obama was.  Nor did Obama have to address the issue from the White House.  He could have easily settled it in his attorney’s office three years earlier.  More importantly, perhaps, it was not the birth certificate that provoked Obama’s wrath.  It was Trump’s ability to see Obama the same way Obama saw himself — as a fraud.

In the way of background, a week prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.  A Democrat and former deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Berg expected to be taken seriously.  He wasn’t.  The media expressed zero interest in his suit.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2021/05/27/justice-departments-kristen-clarke-all-about-skin-color-n1450172

Newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke is a thoroughly modern woman. She could never have been confirmed even during the Clinton administration because of her racially-soaked radical worldview.

But these are revolutionary times, where skin color has gained newfound importance in a way we haven’t seen since June 1964 when segregationists chased civil rights marchers down the streets of St. Augustine, Florida.

If you think the comparison doesn’t work, then you haven’t been paying attention, or you are watching too much MSNBC.

I suppose everything old is new again. Content of character is out. Color of skin is in.

And thus Clarke squeaked by this week on a 51-48 vote to manage the most powerful division of the Justice Department.

The Civil Rights Division has its tentacles in every single aspect of American life – schools, jails, elections, hotels, mortgages, movie theaters, church sermons, bathrooms, computer software, rent rates, service animals on planes, pool chair lifts, mental hospitals and forcing police departments to adopt radical policing policies. I left 100 other topics off the list.

And now, another racialist radical is in charge in the division where I was once an attorney.

Clarke is no ordinary racialist radical, though. She brings a reputation for being racially greedy. I have some personal experience with her on this point.

In 2007, I was working on what would become the Voting Rights Act case of United States v. Georgetown School Board.  I was one of the lawyers who spent many days in South Carolina investigating violations of the Voting Rights Act. Georgetown had a voting-age black population of 34 percent but the at-large elections for school board resulted in no blacks ever being elected to the nine at-large seats.  While there is no right to proportional representation, in theory, blacks could conceivably have won three of nine seats.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/27/defund-the-police-mayoral-candidate-dragged-by-young-car-thieves-n1450337

Atlanta city councilman and mega-liberal mayoral candidate Antonio Brown, who voted last year to defund the Atlanta Police Department by a whopping $73 million, was dragged alongside his car by kiddie-thieves stealing his 2016 Mercedes on Wednesday. The suspects were described as being between the ages of 7 and 11 years old.

Brown, who is running on a platform of “reimagining” the police, arrived at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new Dunkin Donuts-Baskin Robbins combo store around 12:30 p.m. Moments after he stepped out of his car, 4 kids swarmed into his keyless, push-button-start Mercedes and took off. Brown attempted to stop the kids, one of whom “acted like he had a gun.” Brown claimed he was dragged, “about a block” before he let go.

“As he started to speed up, and I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble. And I would have hurt him,” the councilman said, Fox News reported.

I have no idea how the child car thief would have gotten hurt in this scenario. I also have no idea how getting dragged “about a block” didn’t result in numerous injuries for Brown.

Brown’s Instagram, with a whopping (sarcasm) 3,454 followers, posted 10 pictures of the ribbon-cutting ceremony where he and his car were separated by children. The pictures have thus far garnered a staggering (more sarcasm) 114 likes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/st-louis-mayor-guts-police-matthew-vadum/

The newly arrived radical leftist mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the worst murder rate in America, is committed to leaving her constituents at the mercy of violent criminals by defunding the local police department and shutting down one of the city’s two jails.

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, a woke black Democrat, was sworn in in April after narrowly defeating Cara Spencer, a similarly woke leftist white woman.

Jones’s campaign, which focused on “progressive” criminal justice reforms, was unabashedly racist. She said during a debate that Spencer wouldn’t be a good mayor because her skin was the wrong color.

A “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside,” Jones said. “While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city.”

Her victory speech was weighted down with platitudes.

“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”

Her father is crooked former elected official Virvus Jones. Mr. Jones was the city’s chief financial officer from 1988 to 1995 when he left office after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud.

His Twitter feed is woke, incendiary, and subversive. His Twitter profile is a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nero. It reads simply: “An African Proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

In a May 23 tweet he whined as follows: “Warrants issued for non violent or victimless crimes should not be a death sentence for black people. Police in the US are the equivalence [sic] of slave patrols[,]” he wrote, embracing a lie promoted by the 1619 Project. “Most of the warrants the police serve are not for violent crimes so there is no reason to shoot at a person fleeing.”

St. Louis is in rough shape as Mayor Jones takes the reins.

The city had 262 homicides or 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, the highest in the country, Fox News reported, and it is on track to break that record this year.

As of April 7, St. Louis had 50 homicides since January 1, 2021, an increase of 10 from April 7 the previous year.

The 262 figure for 2020 is five less than the record of 267 set in 1993, according to police. “But because the city’s population has declined since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020. The homicide pace in 2021 is ahead of last year’s pace,” KMOV4 reports.

“More police doesn’t prevent crime,” Jones told The Telegraph.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-fall-of-saint-anthony-fauci/#slide-1

On the unforced errors of America’s most political doctor

In mid March of 2020, most Americans, including those in the White House, were still trying to understand the COVID-19 crisis unfolding around them. In a span of 24 hours, the NBA came to a sudden halt when players tested positive for the virus; seemingly minutes later, the American actor Tom Hanks announced from Australia that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had this mysterious new illness; stock markets crashed around the world; President Donald Trump declared a pause on travel from Europe; and the World Health Organization, belatedly, labeled the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 16, the Trump White House called for 15 days to slow the spread of the virus — a lockdown.

The White House coronavirus task force was meeting regularly and issuing daily briefings at that time. In the Situation Room, economic advisers began presenting their models and predictions for the economic effects of lockdown to the task force, including its leader, Vice President Mike Pence, and the president. What the advisers reported was shocking. Just four weeks of lockdown would lead to millions of Americans unemployed, extreme burdens on the public purse, and the greatest one-month contraction of the American economy since the Great Depression. A health adviser present said that, as the lights came up following the presentation, the faces of most of the advisers in the room were ashen. The gravity of what had just been said — all of which shortly came to pass — seemed to have stunned everyone into silence.

Except one man. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), immediately turned to Vice President Pence and asked a question that appeared to dismiss not only the imminent miseries of lockdown but the relevance of the entire subject from the proceedings: “I’m still in charge, right?”

More or less, yes, Fauci was still in charge. And he still is. Though he had spent the weeks before that day giving interviews in which he told Americans to be more concerned about the seasonal flu than the coronavirus, and that the wearing of masks by the public would be useless at protecting them from it, Fauci was cast as the face of America’s best pandemic response, the one figure who took it seriously. Fauci was the anti-Trump, possessed of a “quaint fondness for facts and evidence-based science,” according to the New York Times. Trump’s biggest supporters, sensing that Fauci was delighting in this role and despairing as they were of lockdowns, turned on the doctor, demanding he be fired. The White House began treating the administration’s most prominent medical expert as a threat, circulating anti-Fauci talking points. Which made progressives embrace him all the more. On social media your liberal friends call their COVID-19 vaccine shots their “Fauci ouchies.” Fauci became the latest warrior-saint of “the Resistance,” holding aloft the banner of science and reason.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pandemic-of-anti-semitism-11622131302?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.”

As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.

“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.

Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.

The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.

Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.