RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/black_lives_matter_terrorized_families_at_the_chicago_ronald_mcdonald_house.html

Your daily reminder that mobs have neither morals nor conscience – and that the recent mobs are the Democrats’ domestic terrorism arm.

One of the appalling stories to emerge from the Black Lives Matter mob’s rampage in Chicago on Sunday night was the fact that looters attacked the Ronald McDonald House. Any American who’s watched television in the last 45 years knows about the Ronald McDonald House charity.

The charity, established in 1974, maintains houses near hospitals so that families with hospitalized children have a free, safe, and supportive place to stay. Often, children stay there as well when they have outpatient procedures. In Chicago on Sunday night, however, the Ronald McDonald House was no longer safe; it was terrifying.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/08/08/148-billion-in-federal-fun

Open The Books: Transparent Government Spending
www.openthebooks.com

After the George Floyd protests broke out across major U.S. cities, some mayors and police chiefs were accused of issuing stand-down orders to their police officers. Nightly news streamed video footage of the looting, rioting, and general mayhem that ensued in the absence of a civil order.

“Autonomous zones” sprung up in progressive cities and were described as part of a “summer of love.” Mayors pushed to defund local police departments. Center-right politicians called these cities “lawless” for refusing to protect the life, liberty, and property of its residents.

In Seattle, the highly compensated city council voted to defund their police department. In Congress, an effort led by U.S. Sens Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) pushed to defund these cities of their federal aid.

President Donald Trump indicated a willingness to review the situation. However, nobody knew exactly how much federal funding was “at stake.”

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com quantified $14.8 billion in federal contracts and grants flowing into five major cities where civil unrest looms and policing is restrained: Seattle, Portland, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

We mapped the flow of federal funds during fiscal year 2019 to all units of government based within the city location. Here’s how it breaks down:

Portland, Oregon (Federal awards: $252.5 million | pop. 653,115) A family of four, on average, received $1,548 in federal subsidies ($387 per person).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/11/last-gasp-of-the-mensheviks/

Will the signers of the Harper’s letter realize that only an alliance with the Right can save liberal values?

Some note has been taken of a letter appearing in Harper’s titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Signed by an impressive array of eminent left-leaning literary and academic figures, it challenges the intolerance of the new radical Left. While denouncing “right-wing demagogues” and, of course, Donald Trump, its main focus is to call out the broader “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

The letter points generally to recent incidents where researchers and writers have lost positions and platforms for routine actions which aired even small deviations from the new orthodoxy of the radical Left. It concludes by refusing “any false choice between justice and freedom,” and calls for a culture that preserves “the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” 

The letter has not been well-received by the woke Left. Nonetheless, close on the heels of the Harper’s letter came a poll from the Cato Institute revealing that 62 percent of all American respondents say that the current political climate inhibits them from expressing their honest views. 

Pertinent to the Harper’s Letter, 37 percent of those under 30 and 44 percent of those with postgraduate degrees feel that their careers could be harmed by expressing their sincere political beliefs. Even centrist liberals feel the increasing hostility to open expression, with 52 percent feeling the need to self-censor, an increase from 45 percent only a few years ago. Only those with strongly held liberal views showed a majority who did not feel inhibited. 

This is not the first time that luminaries of the Left have found themselves outflanked by intolerant radicals even further to the Left. Examples from the last century suggest three possible approaches for dealing with this dilemma.