RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/black-lives-matter-antifa-crowd-beat-man-unconscious-in-portland/

A crowd of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in downtown Portland beat a white man unconscious Sunday night after dragging him from his truck, video footage of the incident shows.

The crowd surrounded the man’s white truck around 10:30 p.m. near where he crashed into a light pole at Southwest Broadway and Taylor Street. At least one individual punched him as he sat inside before he was pulled out of the vehicle.The rioters punched the man and forced him to sit in the street as he tried to answer a call from his wife. One man in the crowd wearing a “security” vest delivered a kick to his head from behind that appears to have knocked him out cold and caused his head to bleed after it hit the street.

The rioters can be heard accusing the man of attempting to run them over in his truck, but video clips on social media appear to show the moments just before the attack, when the man attempted to help a person the crowd had previously robbed and beaten. When the crowd turned on him, he attempted to drive away to escape, but ended up crashing his truck.

“He wrecked his car, and he got beat up because he tried to run people over,” said one black-clad man as he escorts a crying woman to the sidewalk.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/16/trumpism-a-look-backward-and-forward-to-november/

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

If Trump left his agenda at that, NeverTrumpers likely would be disgruntled but mostly quiet. The Left, as is its wont with Republican presidents, would have remained serially hysterical as in the Reagan and Bush years, but not completely unhinged as it has been since 2017. 

What distinguished Trump then was not just his substance, but also his style. Translated it could be envisioned as chemotherapy, toxic enough to kill the status-quo cancer, but not quite lethal enough to kill the host. Or maybe Trump derangement arose from class disdain over the orange skin, the combed over dyed hair, the mile-long ties, the Queens accent, the oddly agile bulkiness, the raucous Manhattan career—the antithesis to all that appears on the Sunday morning talk shows.

https://babylonbee.com/news/report-kamala-harris-already-vetting-vp-picks

U.S.—Supporters of Kamala Harris have been eagerly awaiting an announcement on who her VP pick will be when she takes over as president approximately 5 minutes after Joe Biden is inaugurated. According to sources close to the campaign, she is already vetting possible candidates for the job. 

“I am proud to announce I will soon be announcing my pick for Vice President of the United States,” said Harris. “We have searched all across this great land. While I cannot yet confirm who my pick will be, I can say this: my pick for VP will be even MORE of a woman and even MORE of color than I am. It will be the most colorful and womanly team ever!” She then threw her head back and cackled maniacally.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/slain-dhs-whistleblower-philip-haney-not-resting-lloyd-billingsley/

Through his work in the Middle East, Philip Haney gained deep knowledge of Islam, jihad, and terrorist networks around the world. In 2016, Philip Haney authored See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. Haney was reportedly at work on a sequel, which has yet to appear.

On February 21, 2020, Haney was found dead from a gunshot wound in Amador County, California. Haney’s friends denied he was suicidal, and some were certain he had been murdered. CNN set the tone for the way establishment media would cover the case.

“Haney’s controversial accusations that the Obama administration could have prevented terrorist attacks were polarizing among Americans,” Laura Hoy reported on February 23. Hoy had no take on whether Haney’s accusations were true, and she included no citations from Haney’s book or his Frontpage articles such as, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” and “The Terrorist Ties that Bind.”

As Hoy explained, “Haney’s death is likely to become political ammo for Republicans heading into the 2020 presidential elections.” That raises questions about another key player in the case.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/why-trump-should-win-bruce-thornton/

Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms”  that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.

But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.

First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/americas_current_suicide_attempt.html

It’s tempting to look on current events as unprecedented, with divisions as deep as at any time since the Civil War.  An antidote to this ahistorical view is to read (or re-read) historian Paul Johnson’s 1983 Modern Times — especially the chapters titled “American’s Suicide Attempt” and “The Collective Seventies.” Moreover, what we are experiencing now, as a renewed suicide attempt gains traction, can be seen as a direct result of those policies and the misconceptions that produced them.   As Johnson sees it, a good part of the suicide attempt stemmed from the Vietnam War and the attempt by another Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson, to eradicate poverty.  

As historian Johnson sees it, President Johnson believed in the boundless capacity of the American economy to deliver.  While President Kennedy found it difficult to educate congress in his social spending ideas, to honor his memory, in the wake of his assassination in 1963, Johnson was able to pass bills to fund “The Great Society.”

 Johnson writes:

The danger of the kind of welfare state Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state.   Poverty increased when families split up, either by old people living apart or by divorce.   Legislation often promoted these processes.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/13/the_fiasco_of_go_ahead_break_

After looters struck downtown Chicago on Sunday night, officials literally raised the bridges to prevent rioting hordes from roaming so easily. They also blocked road access and stopped public transit. So, we have come to this: a major American city is replicating the strategy of medieval castles: flood the moats and raise the drawbridges. All that is missing are crenelated battlements and Welsh longbowmen.

In Portland, officials aren’t even raising the drawbridges. After more than 70 nights of rioting, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s strategy seems to be, “If you insist on doing this, we might write a strong letter.” He has stopped short of repeating what Monty Python’s French knight told invaders at his castle, “Go away or I will taunt you a second time.” Mayor Wheeler hasn’t taunted them a first time.

Wheeler has plenty of company among Democratic mayors and governors. Months after George Floyd’s death and the rioting and looting that followed, stores remain boarded up, criminals unpunished. Nothing says, “We protest racial injustice” like burning down the corner grocery or smashing windows to grab boxes of expensive Nikes. Instead of condemning the vandalism and jailing those who committed it, many mayors and city councils are trying to mollify their demands, slash police funding, and wait it out. The appeasement approach will fail to mollify the vandals, but it will enrage ordinary citizens, who want their lives back and an end to all this moral hectoring.

As we suffer through this summer of discontent, we can see a split emerging among big-city Democrats. Most, like Portland’s Wheeler, Minneapolis’ Jacob Frey, Seattle’s Jenny Durkan, and New York’s Bill de Blasio, favor drastic concessions to protesters, beginning with sharp reductions in police budgets. Seattle just passed a new budget cutting up to 100 officers, slashing salaries for department leaders, and dismantling the special team that removes homeless encampments, one of the city’s worst problems. Seattle’s police chief, Carmen Best, responded by announcing her retirement. She was the first black woman to head the department. No matter to the city council, which was busy congratulating itself for taking what it called “a first step” toward upending the city’s law enforcement. Still, the vote wasn’t unanimous. One council member was angry because the cuts didn’t go far enough. This isn’t sensible policy; it’s senseless self-parody.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/12/elected-officials-need-to-quell-riots-or-therell-be-bloody-street-justice/

When a group of black bloc “protesters” arrived over the weekend at a Fort Collins, Colorado, neighborhood that was hosting a pro-police rally, the locals turned back the troublemakers. It wasn’t a particularly vicious encounter. But it was a foretaste. We’ll be seeing more violence in our streets unless elected leaders start doing their jobs.

Everyday Americans, seeing the savagery committed without consequence by Antifa, and in the name of Black Lives Matter, are fed up. They’ve seen the looting, the destruction, the assaults, and the death that the “mostly peaceful” demonstrators are leaving behind. They understand the difference between constitutional, peaceful protests and barbaric riots that are intended to destabilize and crack apart our society and Western civilization. And they’ve watched elected officials not only approve of the violence but in some cases encourage it.

But if those elected officials don’t soon take back the streets from the criminals, everyday Americans might soon do the job for them. We leave it to columnist and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson to make this point far more eloquently than we can:

There will be a counterrevolution because without one there is not much of America left. And about 250 million people liked the America prior to March 1 and finally, in extremis, won’t so easily give it up.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5

My first blog post on the subject of Chicago was way back in 2012. In that post, I placed Chicago in the special category of American cities that I called the “basket cases” — places with declining populations, astoundingly high rates of violent crime, in every case mostly black on black, and, of course, uninterrupted rule by leftist Democrats for generations. I had this to say about Chicago:

You may ask, is Chicago really basket case? . . . The downtown is in good shape, with new condos and office towers; the near north side is upscale and attractive.  But the population has gone from a peak of 3,620,962 in the 1950 census to just 2,695,598 in 2010.  [And if instead of staying downtown you take] the Green Line el south from the loop to the end of the line, . . . you will observe huge deteriorated public housing projects surrounded by vast vacant areas and abandoned private buildings.

The violent crime rate also clearly qualifies Chicago for the label of basket case. Murders hit a peak of 756 in 2016 (about 28 per hundred thousand people, compared to a rate for the U.S. as a whole of about 5 per 100,000). After a few years of modest declines, murders are on track to equal or top the 756 this year, with 440 through July. In fact, July 2020 just set a new record for most murders in a month, with 105.