RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/portland-what-does-it-mean-david-horowitz/

Perhaps the most emblematic moment in the battles raging in American cities came the other day when Bernie Sanders attacked President Trump’s decision to send federal agents to quell the riots in Portland Oregon. His alleged reason: they bear the earmarks of a “police state.” This, from a man who spent the entire sixty years of his adult life supporting every ruthless, communist police state on the planet – and there were many – and who to this day declares his solidarity with the police states in the West Bank and Gaza run by his terrorist comrades in the PLO and Hamas. Of course these twisted values have made him the most popular Democrat leader.

Our cities are under siege by communists like Bernie and other self-declared enemies of America who have made eminently clear that they are Marxists and their goal is the destruction of our democracy, which they hope to replace with a communist gulag. In the last two months these violent criminals have torched 400 American cities, injured more than a thousand police officers, killed more than a dozen individuals, looted and destroyed billions of dollars worth of downtown real estate and merchandise, all the while demanding the defunding of police departments. This has led to a violent crime wave resulting in the deaths of scores of individuals including at least eight children – all of them black.

Portland is the epicenter of this insurrection, the extent of which America hasn’t witnessed since the Civil War. Every night for the last two months thousands of criminals have attacked Portland’s downtown, firing explosives and wielding machetes, terrorizing its inhabitants, setting fire to its hall of justice, smashing public monuments and calling for the abolition of the United States. Like every other major American city that has been victimized, Portland’s mayhem has been made possible by the actions of a seditious mayor and city council who have refused to perform the first task of government, which is to keep its citizens and their property safe.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/04/the-two-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse-fauci-and-redfield/

America’s number one health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, because of those ballgame photos, should be the most notorious unmasked person since the Phantom of the Opera. But, he insisted to Fox News “I had my mask around my chin. I had taken it down. I was totally dehydrated and I was drinking water, trying to rehydrate myself,” Fauci. Actually, the published ones either show his hands together or wrapped around a cell phone. Further, in a virtually empty stadium, he also found no room for “social distancing,” sitting between two others seat-to-seat.

Still, it may be hard to accuse the director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, “the nation’s most trusted disease expert,” of hypocrisy on anything since he has been all over the map on masks, epidemic severity, and pretty much every other aspect of COVID-19.

Further, in fairness he should be sharing the stage of infamy with America’s other top health official, CDC Director Robert Redfield, both of whose antics I have been documenting since they “blossomed” during the first epidemic hysteria of our time, that of heterosexual AIDS. Yet Redfield is virtually never found culpable for anything.

Let’s start with Fauci.

The Fallacious Dr. Fauci

The left-wing publication Vox.com notes it was not coronavirus but, “an earlier crisis that shaped (Fauci’s) career — and that’s crucial to understanding his position today.” Indeed. Nobody did more to kick off the U.S. AIDS alarm than Fauci, who was sole author of a 1983 piece in the prestigious JAMA in which he declared the disease might be transmissible by “routine close contact, as within a family household.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/04/one-swedish-model-to-copy-no-more-covid-19-lockdowns/

We’re getting an awful lot of very bad advice from public officials about how to handle the resurgent coronavirus pandemic. All of a sudden, we’re told, we must lock down the economy again, for our own good. Common sense and experience, it seems, have flown the coop. Just look at Sweden, which avoided a lockdown and slashed its daily COVID-19 death rate.

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari is the latest to create a stir by saying he favored a “really hard” four-to-six week lockdown of the economy to get the virus under control and help the economy rebound later.

The only problem is, we already had lockdowns. We were told it would be a couple of weeks, so we could “flatten the curve.” Then, even as the infection rate fell, governors and big city mayors decided to keep their economies shut.

It didn’t work, unless you count destroying people’s dreams, small businesses, jobs and life savings.

Another “really hard” lockdown? Sorry. Recent research shows the lockdowns didn’t do anything but make Americans miserable by killing small businesses by the hundreds and laying off millions of workers.

A Fed president should know better.

As economist Abigail Deveraux, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Economic Growth, noted in a report for the American Institute for Economic Research, “it’s obvious that if you restrict and ban certain businesses, they will suffer for it. Some business owners who made it through the first wave of lockdowns are saying their businesses won’t be able to survive another. This isn’t rocket science.”

She has data to back it up here, showing that, as the title of her piece says, “Longer Lockdowns Associated with Much Worse Economic Outcomes.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/new-york-city-policing-crisis-mayor-bill-de-blasio-blame/

O n Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, cops carried out a routine arrest of an 18-year-old New York activist who is suspected of disabling police cameras by spraying paint on them. The person is suspected of this for very good reason: There are videos starring the perpetrator carrying out the act in question. (Allegedly.) The arresting officers were plainclothes members of the NYPD. The video of the arrest, in which plainclothes officers and uniformed police using bikes as barriers efficiently collar the subject, went “viral,” meaning it became attractive to stupid people who evidently have never seen Serpico or The Wire and insisted this was a “kidnapping” carried out by “stormtroopers,” presumably acting at the behest of Darth Trumper.

Plainclothes officers, in unmarked vehicles, are an essential crime-fighting tool and have been deployed for a very long time. Even a lintbrain such as Mayor Bill de Blasio, or Governor Andrew Cuomo, knows this. Yet what did they both do? Explain to the public how policing works? Of course not. They both denounced the police.

Cuomo was especially obtuse, calling the cops’ actions “outrageous,” because when you’re governor of New York, you’re at a remove from municipal police activity. But de Blasio should know better than to react as he did, which was to mewl support for the leftist street agitators of whom the arrestee was one. De Blasio has been badly burned before for issuing various no-confidence votes in the police force yet he called the arrest “insensitive,” adding that “we’re in a particular historical moment where there has to be sensitivity where folks are understandably worried about what they’re seeing coming out of Washington about the defense of democratic rights.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/02/a-victims-of-communism-day-is-long-overdue/

The fact that socialists and Communists are still voted into power with swagger; the fact that this creed’s savage foot soldiers—Black Lives Matter and Antifa—are cast as pacifists, seekers of equity and justice demonstrates that Communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress” in the eyes of the world whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies.

If anything, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression—that “800-page compendium of the crimes of communist regimes worldwide”—treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and the “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.”

On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million dead,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims, variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered, is the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The Jewish people have carried out “the solemn obligation to keep the memory of its martyrs alive in the conscience of the world.” The civilized world has internalized the methods and meaning of the “Final Solution.” As The Black Book observes approvingly, “Hitler and Nazism are now a constant presence in Western print and on Western television.”

Rumors and intel flew around for days leading up to Saturday, August 1. Dozens of activists were being bused into Austin, Texas, from Portland and Seattle to do to this city what they have done to both of those. Rumors suggested they wanted to destroy Austin police headquarters, the Texas state capitol, or both.

Downtown apartment residents received flyers warning them that the outsiders might attempt to gain entry to their buildings to get to the roof.

It should go without saying this activity would put numerous innocent people in harm’s way and constitute egregious violations of private property rights. Antifa and BLM activists have repeatedly demonstrated their disdain for the latter by destroying, defacing, and looting private property. Protesters surrounding cars, assaulting and shooting drivers and other innocents have repeatedly demonstrated their disdain for the former as well.

Protesters also targeted Austin city council member Kathy Tovo with a march on her home because she is the lone member of the council who has not committed to their demand to gut the Austin police budget. Tovo intends to gut it, but not by as much as the protesters demand.

The flyer above and other information suggested the groups intended to attack Austin police headquarters. The headquarters building has been the site of protests and often violent riots over the past two months. The activists have attempted to storm the building in the past but failed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/cancel-culture-old-tyranny-new-bottles-bruce-thornton/

The last few weeks we’ve seen programmatically progressive media outlets purging their political bedfellows for deviating from the “woke” party line. Some, like erstwhile New York Times editor James Bennet, confessed and apologized for their alleged sins voluntarily, like an old Bolshevik apparatchik in a show-trial. Others, like Times editor Bari Weiss and Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan, resigned before they were hustled to the guillotine, at least salvaging some self-respect. 

And it’s not just today’s people and institutions that are facing the baying mobs of mostly callow millennials who pitch a fit over anything that challenges their fragile self-esteem and “smelly little orthodoxies.” For months we’ve watched two-bit anarchists and race-hustlers knocking down monuments from our history as a graphic repudiation of America and its defining principles––a 21st century version of the old Roman damnatio memoriae, in which enemies of the state or emperor were disappeared from history by removing any public reference to them in inscriptions, statues, or books.

Indeed, today’s “cancel culture” is nothing new. It is just the latest manifestation of tyranny: As Aristotle defined it, “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man willingly endures such a government.”

Historically, the tyrant has achieved that power by violence, especially against anyone who appear to be a threat to his ambitions or power. Herodotus has a famous anecdote about the tyrant’s use of violence. In the 7th century BC, Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, deliberating over how to keep his power safe from rivals, sent a messenger to Thrasybulus of Miletus asking his advice. Thrasybulus led the messenger into a field of wheat, and as he questioned him during their walk, broke off the tallest ears of grain. Periander got the message: “Kill outstanding citizens.”