RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-evan-gershkovichs-freedomand

On March 29, 2023, a 31-year-old American named Evan Gershkovich was meeting a source at a steakhouse in the city of Yekaterinburg, east of the Ural Mountains. The Wall Street Journal reporter had planned to return to his apartment in Moscow, but he never got there: he was picked up by the FSB and dragged out of the restaurant with his shirt pulled over his head. Then, a few months later, the American son of Soviet émigrés was sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony on sham charges of espionage.

Today—491 days since his arrest—he is on a plane back to freedom.

His release was part of what the Journal called the “largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.” (You can read about the secret negotiations that led to the exchange in the WSJ.)

On one side of the swap: terrorists, killers, and spies, including, most infamously, Vadim Krasikov, a convicted Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering a Chechen fighter in a Berlin park in 2019. There are eight such villains worthy of a Homeland episode currently en route to Russia.

On the other side: journalists, dissidents, and democratic activists. There are sixteen of them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/putin_s_prisoner_release_echoes_a_hostage_release_in_january_1981.html

Our adversaries fear strong presidents and will either try to keep them from office or yield to the inevitable. That may explain the events of the last two weeks.

On July 19, 2024, at the RNC convention, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President. During his speech, he said:

To the entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.”

There are more than 60 Americans being held hostage or wrongly detained around the world.

Thirteen days later, on August 01, 2024, this news broke:

The Biden administration has agreed to a prisoner exchange with Russia and is expected to soon secure the release of three American citizens imprisoned in Russia including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a senior administration official confirms. Others are believed to be part of the deal.

Boom! Before Trump assumes office, Russia decides to release its political prisoners.

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

Why have Democrat-run blue cities become such hellholes?

I recently traveled by car to Baltimore to seek medical testing at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. 

I was shocked to see the many empty and boarded-up buildings between the Inner Harbor area, the athletic arenas for baseball, and football and the Johns Hopkins Medical campus. 

We stayed at the hotel located at the north-east corner of the campus, which was very pleasant.  Hospital security staff advised us to avoid the subway system between the harbor and the campus and to not walk that distance, though it is only a little more than a mile. 

We used an Uber service on this advice between the hotel and the harbor. 

On the route I noticed beautiful old narrow row homes well maintained only blocks from deserted buildings. 

I grew up in New York City and lived in three of the boroughs over my lifetime.  I was aware of neighborhoods to avoid due to crime, but never felt unsafe during those times.  I routinely used the New York City subways without concern. 

That was before the COVID crisis left many with a sense of dread and fear. 

I went to college in St. Louis and visited Chicago many times during that period.  I had little fear then, though I avoided crime-ridden neighborhoods.  I have visited Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco many times over the years. 

But now I am much more cautious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sanitizing-violent-flag-burning-pro-hamas-protesters/

On the same day that President Joe Biden implied Jan. 6 was a darker day than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, leftist protesters fought and shoved police and burned the American flag near the Capitol. They pulled down the American flag and replaced it with the Palestinian flag. Some flew the Hamas flag and vandalized monuments with spray-painted slogans like “Hamas is comin’” and “I commend Hamas.”

The occasion was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of Congress. So how would our D.C.-riot-hating media treat this? Some largely pretended it did not exist (like The Wall Street Journal news pages). Even Netanyahu denouncing some protesters as “useful idiots” for Iran didn’t drag out more detail.

Others went into denial. On the “PBS NewsHour,” reporter Nick Schifrin asked former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) about Netanyahu calling protesters “useful idiots” for Iran. Malinowski replied, “If you look at the protesters who are flying the Hamas flag and burning the American flag —” Schifrin interrupted: “You mean they’re flying the Palestinian flag.” No, photographs showed Hamas flags were flown by someone. It’s funny how they avoid that.

On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” reporter Jennifer Ludden found protesters to denounce Biden as a “silent accomplice,” but insisted they were “largely peaceful.” Shoving cops and vandalizing monuments and burning flags were not “considered.”

On NBC, you could see vandalized monuments behind anchorman Lester Holt, but he and reporter Andrea Mitchell merely used the “thousands of protesters” to underline that Netanyahu was controversial, not that the protesters were in any way controversial. No flag-burning appeared, and no violence toward police was pointed out.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/this_is_still_our_country.html

It is a crazy time to be alive.  We have economic uncertainty, threats of war, political violence, and social turmoil.  An assassin nearly took President Trump’s life.  Puppet President Biden has been recycled for a younger model.  The Olympic Games openly mocks Christianity and celebrates transvestitism.  The EU, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. are all tiptoeing toward a little nuclear tête-à-tête.  Apprehension saturates the air.

Still, if you were a time-traveler from the future surveying the world as it unfolds today, you might whisper, “What an amazing time to be alive.”  That is a luxury that those who look back through history often enjoy.  Those living through chaos rarely write about trying times as marvelous adventures.  They are too busy struggling to survive.  

I do not wish to minimize the struggles that we will continue to experience, but I do want to take a small step back and recognize this moment for what it is: a hinge on the door of history opening up a new era for humanity.  The hallway we’ve been walking down for many decades has come to an end.  The door before us is shaking loudly as we fight for what reality will take shape on the other side.  Our situation is perilous and consequential.  

Future generations — buttressed by a misguided belief that their world was always foreordained — will dream about having been alive in our time, just as many of us have contemplated what it would have been like to fight in the trenches of WWI, endure the volatile interwar period, or beat back totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century.  Ours is not an easy time…but it is one ripe with significance.

Is this a contest between communism and capitalism?  Is it a war between West and East?  Is it a clash of civilizations, cultures, religions, and traditional beliefs?  It is all of that and more.  At its heart, the revolution that is picking up speed throughout the world centers on one essential conflict: state supremacy versus individual freedom.  

The war that has already begun is the mechanism for answering a straightforward question: how much liberty will each of us be “allowed” to possess, and how much control will governments maintain over their respective populations?  As with all wars, this one concerns the exercise and retention of power.  Somewhat uniquely, however, our war will decide whether we individual humans are ultimately sovereign arbiters over the direction of our personal lives, or whether we are disposable cogs in an all-powerful government machine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20821/fight-against-treachery

One does not need to embrace religion to recognize that something beyond our understanding saved former President Donald Trump from death. With the FBI confirming that it was, in fact, a bullet that came to within millimeters of a fatal head wound, Trump has survived an assassination attempt that would have changed the course of American history.

Some call it divine intervention. Others chalk it up to simply fate. It reminds us of those Americans who went to work in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 and those delayed in transit. Today, we each must reflect on the forces that had an assassin miss his target by a literal hair’s breath.

Trump, shaking off the shock of a failed assassination attempt with an appeal to “fight,” stood tall, with blood on his face, his fist in the air and an appeal to “fight,” in defiance of treachery. It was a response that will go down in history.

Not so fortunate was an extraordinary firefighter, Corey Comperatore. As shots rang out at the rally, he lay across his family to protect their lives, taking a fatal bullet. Two others who attended the rally were severely wounded. We are praying for their swift and full recovery.

It may have been divine intervention that saved Donald Trump, but freedom is the Almighty’s gift enshrined in American values, Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. Americans should be forever grateful to the founding fathers for their breathtaking wisdom and foresight.

https://tomklingenstein.com/draining-the-swamp-is-now-a-job-for-congress/

Wading into the confusing abyss of administrative law, on June 28 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overruled the much-criticized 1984 decision in Chevron, restoring the bedrock principle—commanded by both Article III of the Constitution and Section 706 the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act—-that it is the province of courts, not administrative agency bureaucrats, to interpret federal laws. This may sound like an easy ruling, but the issue had long bedeviled the Supreme Court. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, an administrative law expert, supported Chevron prior to his death in 2016. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice John Roberts sure-footedly dispatched Chevron.

If, as I wrote for The American Conservative in 2021, “Taming the administrative state is the issue of our time,” why did the Supreme Court unanimously (albeit with a bare six-member quorum) decide in Chevron to defer to administrative agencies interpretations of ambiguous statutes, and why did conservatives — at least initially — support the decision? In a word, politics. In 1984, the President in charge of the executive branch was Ronald Reagan, and the D.C. Circuit — where most administrative law cases are decided—was (and had been for decades) controlled by liberal activist judges. President Reagan’s deputy solicitor general, Paul Bator, argued the Chevron case, successfully urging the Court to overturn a D.C. Circuit decision (written by then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg) that had invalidated EPA regulations interpreting the Clean Air Act. Thus, in the beginning, “Chevron deference” meant deferring to Reagan’s agency heads and their de-regulatory agenda.    

http://www.swtottd.blogspot.com

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”   Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            In many social settings, silence is the better alternative. As my mother would say: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or my father: “Better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” And my mother-in-law would quote the ancient proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.”

Yet silence does not always contain the remedies its fans claim. In The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously, Martin Luther King wrote: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel spoke: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever humans endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

The silence of which I write does not bear the evil of which King and Wiesel wrote and spoke, nor is it the silence of my late in-laws and parents that leads to worried looks and shaking heads in social gatherings. My concern is the Omeretà, the code of silence of politicians and their accommodating friends in the media – it is the silence that deprives people of the facts necessary to make informed decisions. As the British Parliamentarian Rory Stewart wrote in the prologue of his recent book How Not to be a Politician, “The public see the appearance that someone else chooses to share.”

https://substack.com/@glennloury/note/c-63185924?utm_source=feed-email-digest

This “America ain’t so great and never was.” posture is a sophomoric indulgence.

In the 21st century, our birthright citizenship in this republic is an inheritance of immense value.

Black Americans are a privileged and blessed people.

Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.

The Civil War left 600,000 dead in a country of 30 million.

The consequence of that war, together with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments enacted just afterward, was to make the enslaved Africans and their descendants into citizens.

In the fullness of time, we have become equal citizens.

Should that have taken another 100 years? No.

Neither should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place.

But here’s the thing.

Slavery has been a commonplace human experience since antiquity.

Emancipation – The freeing of the slaves en masse.

That was a new idea. It was a Western idea.

It was the fruit of enlightenment.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/28/americas-lab-rats/

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.