RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.racket.news/p/the-surrender

The decision was announced at a White House briefing Monday morning. “In light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.,” was the quote from Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.

It’s difficult to read the line “in light of this weekend’s events” and not see an admission on the part of the White House that Secret Service protection was previously being denied to Kennedy, Jr. for political reasons, or out of spite, if those are even two different things in this era. Whatever the original prerogative was for pushing the envelope with that denial, it seems to have been removed by series of paradigm-shattering news events, leading to a flurry of real and symbolic surrenders.

MSNBC likewise made an extraordinary decision Sunday night to pull Morning Joe, with CNN saying the network wanted to “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television.” As with the Secret Service decision, MSNBC was making a major admission, essentially telling audiences its lead morning news show is either not really a news show, or that its format only holds up under something less than maximum scrutiny. I can’t recall a similar act of self-sabotage in media.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/07/joe-biden-on-the-back-foot/

Within minutes of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Joe Biden’s handlers suspended all campaign advertising. They had no choice. As demonstrated in the weeks leading up to the shooting, the Democrats’ ads had assailed him as a threat to everything that is good and decent about America. Incendiary rhetoric, as the President intoned on Sunday night in his address to the nation, must be condemned.

Below, excerpts of that Oval Office (in italic) message and, below each, some links and background to what might well be the biggest example of hypocrisy since Captain Renault evinced shock at finding a roulette wheel in Rick’s gin joint.

My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.  We’re neighbors.  We’re friends, coworkers, citizens.  And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans.  And we must stand together. 

Translation: We must stand together, especially those amongst my fellow Democrats who have been calling on me to stand down. 

Yesterday’s shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back, take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here. 

How indeed! The day before Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullet took the tip off Donald Trump’s right ear, the man demanding “a step back” from fighting words variously described Trump as “a rapist”*, “a convicted criminal”, “a business fraud”, “a threat to this nation” who is “unhinged” and, inevitably, an enemy of “our democracy” who would force the public servants he doesn’t sack to pledge their loyalty to him personally.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-compromised-secret-service

It was a shot heard around the world. 

On Saturday, a gunman whom the FBI has identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks fired a burst of rifle shots at former president Donald Trump, grazing his ear and nearly killing him. The attempted assassination is an historic, and perilous, moment. We’ll get commentaries and investigations, and the government will announce reforms.

But amid all the chaos weaves the thread of another story, one that reveals a mounting problem in our political life. A surprising number of the Secret Service agents protecting the former president were women. And, according to video recordings of the scene, many did not acquit themselves favorably.

Scene one: after President Trump ducks, a group of agents leaps to him and protects him with their bodies. A female agent who rushes to the stage acts bravely, without a doubt, but the point of the “huddle” is to protect the president. The agent was much shorter than President Trump, leaving his head and neck exposed after he stood up.

Scene two: as Trump enters the escape vehicle, a female Secret Service agent fumbles her gun and cannot find her holster; another female agent appears confused and, in the moment of crisis, decides to use both of her hands to put on her sunglasses; a third looks frightened and uncertain.

These agents wear the typical Secret Service outfits—Kevlar vests pressing against white shirts; black blazers with gold pins; dark sunglasses—but to an impartial observer, they do not appear to have the same poise, confidence, and strength as the male agents around them.

The obvious question: Why so many female agents? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as in many other institutions: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted “diversity” as a key priority and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, named to the position in 2022, has pledged to increase dramatically the number of women in the ranks.

This is official policy. The Secret Service openly boasts that it “prioritizes recruiting women candidates” and has formulated an “affirmative action” plan to increase the number of women, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/political-rhetoric-and-the-trump-assassination-attempt

By December 2023, the Biden campaign’s frequent equation of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler had caught the attention even of some in the mainstream media. “In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step,” wrote Politico. “For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” CNN predicted that the Trump-is-Hitler “attack line” would likely be “central” to the president’s efforts to win reelection. Other outlets contributed their own Trump-Hitler comparisons. The New Republic’s June 2024 issue, a special report on “American Fascism,” showed a blended image of Trump and the Führer on its cover.

It was not even necessary to make an explicit Hitler comparison; the similarities were too obvious. Robert Kagan told the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart that Trump was a “natural dictator.” If you “give him unchecked power in the United States, I think any sensible person would find that a frightening proposition.” Americans are whistling past the graveyard, Kagan warned. All checks on presidential power will be impotent against Trump’s attacks on the Founder’s constitutional order, he declared.

“Existential threats” can seem to demand a different set of rules from those governing ordinary political life. Had the July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler been successful, the plotters would have been greeted across the world as heroes.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who missed blowing out Donald Trump’s brain by a few inches and who murdered a Trump supporter instead, may have thought of himself as just such a hero-in-waiting.

So now we gaze into the abyss. Every act of political violence opens up the prospect of the collapse of civil order. When political disagreement becomes lethal and political leaders risk their lives to run for or occupy political office, we trade the civil peace bequeathed to us by centuries of Western civilization for Third World anarchy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/an-indomitable-spirit/

Donald Trump never blinks.

There’s nothing that’s happened to Donald Trump since his rise to political prominence that has made him blink, and now we can add to the list an assassination attempt.

Trump displayed remarkable sangfroid in the immediate aftermath of an effort to murder him? Yes, of course, he did. He insisted on not leaving the stage before he’d made a gesture of strength and resilience? Well, what would you expect? He took a nightmarish attack against him and turned it into an iconic image that will cement his status as a populist legend? Are you surprised?

Trump’s extraordinary reaction in Butler, Pa., was entirely in character.

This is a man with an indomitable spirit that has seen him through business reverses, tabloid scandals, and innumerable battles with all comers over the decades. Like most anything else, this quality has its downsides — it can lead him to persist in error, or insist on his own reality — but he wouldn’t be on the cusp of the presidency again without it.

If Trump has never shown any sign of cracking under pressure, it’s because he simply doesn’t feel pressure like a normal person. A fatalism combined with a faith that he’ll find a way out of any fix means that he doesn’t lose sleep over anything.

Although there were any number of controversies during his presidency that would have cracked or worn down a more conventional politician, he carried on as usual. Over the last two years, his partisan opponents have thrown criminal charges at him that carry the risk of him spending the rest of his life in prison; sure, he’s fought the charges like a caged animal, yet he’s never seemed down or frazzled. And now this.

After spending so much time displaying coolness under metaphorical fire, he displayed coolness under actual fire.

A cliché in sports about particularly assured players is that they “slow the game down.” Trump, at his best, does the same thing, and we saw it on the stage in Butler. Whereas he could be forgiven for being confused and in shock after the shooting, he didn’t lose sight of the need to show that he was unbowed, to reassure his supporters, and to project strength.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/assassination-porn-and-the-sickness-on-the-left/

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way:

We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.

But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/13/n-y-times-columnist-wants-trump-dead-seriously-2/

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on I&I on July 3. It has been excerpted with permission from the author. To read the entire article, click here.

John McWhorter, the prominent academic, author and New York Times columnist, wants everyone to know that he’s sorry that he recently suggested it would be a good thing if someone were to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

Except he’s not, really. But at least he owns it.

“I have taken a great deal of heat for saying, for implying, that I wish somebody would kill Donald Trump,” McWhorter said on the new episode of “The Glenn Show” with Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury. “That is exactly what I was implying. It was irresponsible of me to say that in a public space. I really shouldn’t have said it here.”

But then McWhorter acknowledges that it wasn’t a one-off. “I have said it often,” he admitted. (The podcast can be found here; the conversation on Trump starts at 4:04, and McWhorter’s non-apology apology begins at 17:49.)

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/14/a-new-offensive-trump-the-gop-and-the-battle-for-americas-future/

Having just spent a week padding about battle sites around Verdun and the Somme,  I could not help but register the historical vibration of certain dates. Was it entirely coincidental that on July 18, 1918, Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, launched a major counteroffensive against the Germans in the Second Battle of the Marne? That operation  was the beginning of the end for the Boche.  They sued for peace in November after American General John Pershing crushed the German forces near Montfaucon, northwest of Verdun.

This Thursday, July 18, 2024, Donald Trump will deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. I like to think that Trump’s address will mark the beginning of a potent counteroffensive against the soul-blighting, woke forces of the Democratic juggernaut.

Like the German army in the summer of 1918, the Democrats are in rabid disarray.  On paper, they still command impressive force.  They continue to jail their political  opponents and shower Donald Trump with potentially lethal legal shrapnel. [UPDATE: I wrote this column  before the assassination attempt on Donald  Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania yesterday.  I will have more to say about that in due course.]

But though their guns may continue their periodic eructations, morale among the troops teeters on despair. Their leaders are panicking.

Of the Kaiser, Winston Churchill once remarked that “in every crisis he crumbled.  In defeat, he fled; in revolution, he abdicated; in exile, he remarried.” What would Churchill say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Addressing NATO a few days ago, the leader of the free world introduced the President of Ukraine as “President Putin.” Asked whether he really thought Kamala Harris was up to the top job, Biden said, “I would not have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I did not think she is qualified to be president. Let’s start there.”

Shall we start there? Harris, the half-Indian, half-Jamaican scion of slave owners,  may be a certified “person of color.” But she is also living proof that senility is not the only form of cognitive-rhetorical incapacity.

Like the Germans in the summer of 1918, the Democrats and their media poodles are full of sound and fury.  The New York Times, for example, is regularly on the battlements, delivering anguished rhetorical air-raid sirens. They understand that “Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished.” Hence, the Times, along with other besieged media battalions, are engaged in a desperate pantomime to diffuse the biggest threat to their franchise. Donald Trump is “unfit to lead,” they skirl; Republicans will rue the day Trump is reelected, they insist. He’s a dictator in waiting, a bully, and a man of bad character who tramples upon the rule of law.

This signal-jamming wall of static is impervious to fact—including the fact that almost every item of the Democrats’ bill of indictment is a morsel in the giant feast of projection that Trump’s opponents have laid on.

https://victorhanson.com/our-brezhnev-our-pravda-our-soviet-union/

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication.

By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure.

Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous health and constant hands-on involvement.

“Journalists” sent out false communiques. They spun narratives that Brezhnev was robust, hale, and working long hours on behalf of the Russian people. Any dissenting journalists who sought to report the true, sad state of affairs were in danger of losing their jobs, freedom—or even their lives.

Instead, the “reporters” of Pravda (“Truth”), the official print megaphone of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote lies about Brezhnev’s busy workdays. Pravda’s handlers spun fables about the respect (and fear) the rest of the world held for such a dynamic leader—even as Brezhnev became an ill virtual recluse.

The cynical Russian people shrugged because they had long been accustomed to their lying media and the falsehoods they peddled. And besides, Brezhnev was a doctrinaire Stalinist communist. So his job was not to rock the boat or upset the Russian communist hierarchy.

Instead, he reigned over the penultimate Soviet “era of stagnation,” while an ossified communism increasingly destroyed all incentives and hope, leaving the Russian people poor, cynical, and helpless.

Something similar has happened to a calcified America under President Joe Biden. Like the late-stage Leonid Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only. He has outsourced his administration to a vestigial hard-left apparat from the Obama years.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/sociologys-descent-into-woke-satire/

Most casual observers, especially those with even slight conservative leanings, would agree that sociology is obviously left-wing. But this wasn’t always the case. When I began my sociology graduate work in the early nineties, it was the classical spirit of the discipline that drove me. There was then enough of the residue of what the discipline had been at its origins to enable idealistic souls like myself to imagine that sociology was still about uncovering the objective realities of social life, rather than simply producing a radical mythology that denounced all that existed and preached the necessity of total revolution.

Radical Marxist approaches were certainly there from the beginning. But many of these had at least the patina of intellectual seriousness and required substantive efforts to challenge and dismantle. However much one disagreed with Marx, for example, one could not reasonably call him a fool and a charlatan, at least if one had read him. He was wrong, but not obviously ignorant of basic things and oblivious to the requirements of argument and evidence.

Today’s sociology is so patently devoid of any intellectual rigor that most of it evokes only contemptuous laughter. The arguments advanced, the “evidence” mustered to support its partisan claims, are so weak that it is genuinely amazing to realize that the people making these cases have spent many years in educational institutions and yet have come away from all that with either no understanding of or an utter contempt for careful and rigorous argument.

Sociology Advertises Its Product

For example, the American Sociological Association (ASA) offers a series of video shorts titled “Sociological Insights.” These clips feature sociologists presenting their research in brief, visually engaging morsels. They are intended to provide an introduction to sociological reasoning and analysis. But the viewer who is not already converted to the Woke cult to which the ASA gives its allegiance can be forgiven for thinking, on watching a selection of the videos, that they were made by an enemy of sociology, as a wickedly humorous satire of the discipline.