RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2024/08/21/the-return-of-history-liberal-values-and-global-realities-ukraine-russia-europe/

My socialisation into polite liberal society—my crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis—helped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things. I failed to appreciate that my experience was born of a unique moment in human history, and that my enculturation represented a break with normal human existence.

Rather than people competing in conquest and blood, as was the case for nearly all of human history, postwar liberal democracies relied upon consent and converging economic incentives to a greater degree than at any previous time. In this new world, it was taken for granted that liberal values would appeal to anyone given the choice, and reorient people towards economic interdependence and international cooperation. Western societies were free and prosperous, so after the Cold War, many Western commentators and analysts naturally assumed that those newly liberated from tyranny would want to emulate them.

The time I spent living and working in a small Baltic country bordered by an aggressively imperial neighbour forced me to reassess the assumptions with which I was raised. Lithuanians understand that the default state of human beings is not cooperation and humanist values. They were therefore not surprised that, after the Cold War, some actors continued to defy economic self-interest in the name of ideology and festering resentment, bucking the trend of liberalisation.

A failure to appreciate this reality is where well-intentioned liberals like me went wrong.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/22/who-is-destroying-democracy-in-darkness/

The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.

Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic.

That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House.

A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant the false accusation of Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election.

That gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled the Trump 2016 campaign. That hoax would later sidetrack 22 months of his presidency before being proven a fantasy.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left next birthed the Russian laptop disinformation campaign.

That hoax also warped a presidential debate with false charges that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to conspire with Trump.

Those unusual efforts continued during the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, the allies of one campaign sought to persuade some 16 states to try to remove a major party’s likely nominee from their primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to smother a Trump third presidential bid in its infancy, and thus once again not allow the people to accept or reject his candidacy.

Nearly simultaneously, four federal, state, and local prosecutors filed dozens of felony charges against Trump.

They all shared some strange similarities.

These indictments would likely not have been filed, had Trump not run for office. Nor would any of them have proceeded had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican seeking reelection.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ferguson-inaugurated-ten-years-of-lies-about-race-in-america

This month marks the tenth anniversary of events that changed the trajectory of this country, and not for the better. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Riots erupted the next day and continued for months nationwide. Black Lives Matter exploited the mayhem it had helped cause, helping it swell into a malign global force. The activist model pioneered at Ferguson has had a lasting impact on American politics, as this year’s pro-Hamas demonstrations prove.

The catalyzing event was a personal tragedy, but from a journalistic perspective, it should have been pretty ho-hum. Wilson was a cop, and Brown had just robbed a convenience store, violently overpowering the clerk. When Wilson tried to stop him in the street, Brown scuffled with him, reaching inside his police SUV through the driver’s window. Brown then ran off and Wilson gave chase. At some point, Brown turned around and charged Wilson. That was when Wilson killed him.

The entire encounter, the Department of Justice later said in a revealing report, lasted two minutes. And that’s how long the story would have lasted, too, except that Wilson was white and Brown was black, and had just turned 18 less than three months earlier.

Those with political motivations manipulated the tragedy in several ways. They claimed that Brown had tried to surrender, raising his hands and pleading with Wilson, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” but the policeman still wantonly gunned him down. That fed the narrative that the killing was part of an epidemic of police killing unarmed blacks in America. And this, in turn, reinforced a theme that the country is “systemically racist” and oppressive.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2024/08/liberals-should-start-taking-anti-israel-activists-at-their-word/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_

Behind the willingness on the mainstream left to indulge the anti-Israel radicals, argues Jonathan Chait, is a tendency to romanticize them while ignoring their actual ideas. Chait, a staunchly liberal journalist who makes some unsympathetic and highly dubious claims about Israel, sees this tendency in some of his own colleagues, who tend to ascribe “the most sympathetic possible motives” to the protesters while avoiding any examination of their “actual beliefs.” Take, for instance, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that interrupted Kamala Harris’s speech in Detroit:

SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.”

Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.

To the extent progressives feel any discomfort with the goals or methods of protesters, they tend to rationalize them by invoking noble protests from past eras.

But the leaders of these specific protests, as Chait documents, have made their actual beliefs quite explicit, and one “common thread” is an “unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood.”

Read more at New York Magazine

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bidens-regulatory-onslaught

Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. government’s regulatory activity in areas like health care, the Internet, environment, and transportation was unprecedented. The hundreds of new regulations that resulted cost the average household roughly $26,000 over a lifetime, according to my new study for Unleash Prosperity, which uses a database of more than 5,000 federal rules. By contrast, the deregulatory focus of Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, wound up saving the average family about $11,000 in lifetime cost burdens. The regulatory pendulum swung back, though, with Joe Biden’s administration. To some extent, this was to be expected, as Democrats are more inclined to regulatory mandates than Republicans. But who would have expected the Biden administration to regulate with such a vengeance? I calculate a lifetime per family burden of $47,000 from Biden’s new regulations.

The Biden regulations are also highly regressive, with low-income households bearing a large cost as a share of their income. The poor pay seven times more when adjusting for their ability to pay.

A prime example is the Department of Transportation’s expensive new fuel economy standards on new cars, SUVs, and trucks. Together with emissions requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency, new vehicles are expected to cost $3,400 more than they would under the standards set by the Trump administration.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/it_s_all_about_the_revolution_ten_techniques_marxists_have_deployed_to_gain_influence.html

For an ideology born in a library to an loathsome scholar, Marxism has never shied from world conquest.  Its earliest proponents, Marx and Engels included, were committed to inciting revolution in all countries.  And Lenin, a man of praxis and internationalism, believed that besides revolution and warfare, the way to defeat capitalism was through propaganda.

To that end, the Left in America has engaged in cultural warfare – a “whole of society” revolution to destroy Western civilization.  Critical Theory, wokeism, DEI, and ideas about gender fluidity – these are all distortions of reality deployed to change our system of values, beliefs, attitudes, and preferences.  Leftists believe that by doing so, they will cause existing social structures to crumble.  They think anarchic socialism will then become viable, emerging from the chaos of a society without order and values.

The following ten are among the techniques of influence the Left uses regularly.  The list is by no means exhaustive, nor without a degree of overlap.  Some methods are as old as time, but some are unique to Marxists.  Awareness of them could help thwart the Left’s malign intentions.

Manipulation of language:  In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ as well as in the novel 1984, George Orwell described how communist dictatorships have used language for controlling people by manipulating perception. 

Examples abound in America today.  Abortion supporters are described as “pro-choice,” sanitizing the extinguishing of a life.  Illegal border-crossers are called “undocumented migrants,” absolving them of criminal intent.  New sets of pronouns, laughable concepts such as “sex assigned at birth,” and dangerous euphemisms like “gender affirming care” disrupt reality while pretending to preserve human dignity.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/19/america-on-fire/

The Democrat Party agenda has not so much transformed America as set it ablaze.

After a catastrophic debate and backstage power struggle, Joseph Robinette Biden told the American people that the time has come to pass the torch. And as his anointed successor would say, that time is now, in a historic concession speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Torch is apt as a metaphor for the agenda that has been pried from Biden’s grasp and passed to Kamala Harris. As carried out under two presidents over 16 years, the Democratic Party agenda has not so much transformed America as set it ablaze.

Inflation — Financial Insecurity

Massive overspending by the Biden administration unleashed inflation that is crushing the finances of working people and middle-income families. Wages have not kept pace with prices and Americans are struggling to pay for food and gas. They have taken on debt, tapped savings and retirement accounts while living precariously from paycheck to paycheck. High interest rates designed to tame inflation have wreaked further havoc on personal finances. For many, the dream of home ownership has gone up in smoke.

Violence And Crime

ttps://amgreatness.com/2024/08/18/harriss-kamunist-agenda-faces-harsh-reality/

Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Cry for Kamala the Kamunist.

It took them a while, it’s true, but at least Argentina has someone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics in charge.

Indeed, Javier Milei, one of my favorite leaders on the world stage today (along with Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Georgia Meloni, and Nayib Bukele) is a Trump-like dynamo.  If I had a more developed entrepreneurial bent, I would try marketing a line of Milei chainsaws in the United States.  Just as he took a chainsaw (sometimes literally) to excessive spending, regulation, and bureaucracy in Argentina, so my Mielei Chainsaws could be employed against waste, fraud, and abuse here across the fruited plain. Milei’s robust policies have put Argentina on the runway to economic success. They have slashed inflation—some 200% when he took office—and his abolition of rent control—surprise, surprise—has sparked a 195% rise in available housing stock.

Meanwhile, the socialists funneling ideas to Harris have put together an economic plan redolent of Venezuela or, indeed, the Soviet Union.  Its centerpiece revolves around centrally promulgated and enforced wage and price controls—a recipe for shortages and inflation.

The plan itself has been ridiculed across the ideological spectrum, from CNN to The Wall Street Journal.  “Harris’ plan to stop price gouging,” quoth CNN in a masterpiece of understatement,  “could create more problems than it solves.”

The WSJ was a bit franker. For one thing, there is “no evidence that supermarkets or other food retailers are gouging anyone. Food prices are higher than they were before the Biden Presidency, but that is because of inflation.”

And who caused that inflation, Kemo Sabe? The man with the keys to the money duplicating machine, Joe Biden or his handlers.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-dark-money-intimidation-group-attacking-election-lawyers/

Amid last-minute rule changes, widely reported ballot irregularities, and an unprecedented movement away from secure, in-person voting, the 2020 election that installed Joe Biden became one of the most hotly contested in American history.

Given this uncertainty, Donald Trump and his allies, including a number of highly qualified attorneys, raised their concerns in the avenue provided by the Constitution: our court system. For this, Trump’s lawyers have been smeared relentlessly in the media, dragged through costly and damaging professional reviews, and bullied into silence or retreat.

That persecution did not happen organically. The intimidation campaign against Trump’s lawyers, and against any who dissented from the approved narrative, was a highly coordinated effort directed from the very center of the Democratic machine.

And the cabal at the heart of this war on blind justice is The 65 Project — named for the number of lawsuits filed by concerned citizens after the 2020 election — driven by David Brock, the consigliere of the professional left. Brock began his career as a conservative hero who exposed the Democrats’ smear campaign against future Justice Clarence Thomas as well as Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” sex scandal — only to turncoat by becoming an accomplice of Hillary Clinton and disavowing his former career as a “right-wing hit man.”

For his betrayal, Brock was handsomely rewarded by Clinton allies, who helped him architect a constellation of far-left attack groups known as the “Brocktopus”, most notably Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, both of which are closely connected with the 65 Project today.

The partisan bias is obvious. Media Matters is the chief attack dog of the Democratic Party, which smears mainstream Republicans as bigoted racists with funding from George Soros, the Tides Foundation, and the National Education Association. It’s currently facing a defamation lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X which alleges the hit group manufactured a report showing advertiser posts next to neo-Nazi posts to drive away major advertisers such as Disney and Apple from the platform. Missouri has joined in with a separate lawsuit accusing Media Matters of fraudulent business practices for fundraising off its anti-X campaign.

American Bridge is the left’s “gaffe database” created to track and record every word spoken by Republican politicians in the hopes of digging up a juicy line to blast over the airwaves. Its most infamous victim was Todd Akin, a former Missouri congressman and 2012 Senate candidate who used the infelicitous term “legitimate rape” during a radio interview — a flub that killed his political career.