RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/1/the-idea-of-an-american-nation

“These developments leave the United States without any strong foundations to keep itself together as a political enterprise—in a circumstance when its increasing diversity requires some kind of unifying thread. What will that be? No one now knows. But unless it is somehow found, the United States will be at risk of blowing itself apart in the twenty-first century, as it did once before in the middle of the nineteenth.”

I begin with a conclusion: the United States of America is nearing a point at which it can no longer be described as a nation-state, in the sense that term is generally used, and is evolving into a different kind of enterprise—one lacking the underpinnings of a common culture, language, religion, or nationality that we commonly associate with modern nation-states.

This is due to several intersecting causes: destructive ideas (identity politics); significant and apparently irresistible developments in the world (globalism and large-scale migration); benign conditions that erode national loyalties (peace and prosperity); and the unique character of the American nation (a nation-state built upon universal principles). These have brought into being new lines of conflict in the United States, with some rallying to preserve an inherited idea of the American nation while others promote the forces that are eroding it. Indeed, America’s two political parties seem to be organizing themselves around this fundamental line of disagreement.

If nationalism is bad, then so are nations and nation-states.

Many say that nationalism is a bad thing—that it is a cause of wars, group hatreds, irrational conflicts, and the like—and that we will live better without it. There is some truth to this. But if nationalism is bad, then so are nations and nation-states. Can we have nations without nationalism? Can we have an American nation absent some sense of American nationalism? Obviously not. While nationalism is sometimes taken too far, it is easy to recognize the vices of nationalism without appreciating its virtues. The United States, with its diversity of geography, conditions, and peoples, would have fallen apart long ago without the idea of a nation to hold it together. As a matter of history, nationalism was held up as the antidote to the tendency of the American union to split up and break apart. As the idea of an American nation retreats, the possibilities for break-up will advance at a similar rate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-obstruction-article-frivolous/

We want our presidents to be elected democratically and to serve out their terms, with impeachment reserved for outrageous abuses of power.

Honor a congressional subpoena to appear at President Trump’s (presumably eventual) Senate impeachment trial? Joe Biden, still the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in the 2020 election, scoffed at the very idea — No way!

The former vice president’s knee-jerk obstinacy illuminates — we should say, provides even more illumination of — the patent farce that is the second article of impeachment passed by the House on a strict party-line vote: the accusation that the president has obstructed Congress. As we saw in a committee hearing, featuring the spectacle of staffers questioning staffers with no actual fact witnesses in sight, Democrats have no problem when Democrats blow off congressional demands for information. “Obstruction” is a one-way street.

Trump regards the impeachment inquiry as a partisan witch hunt, just the latest phase of the Democrats’ project to remove him, which began even before his term started. He certainly has a point . . . although that is not a good reason to give his opponents fuel for the project, as he did by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden. That is the allegation in the first article of impeachment. Under the circumstances, I believe it falls well short of the egregious misconduct for which impeachment should be reserved; it was, nevertheless, a foolish thing for the president to do.

Let’s focus, though, on the second impeachment article, obstruction of Congress.

The president directed his underlings and executive branch components not to comply with congressional demands for information. To be clear, Congress has undeniable constitutional authority, broad in scope, to conduct oversight of the executive branch. The president, with all the authority of a peer branch of government, has extensive privileges of confidentiality, rooted in Article II, particularly when it comes to communications with his staff and high executive officials. Congress, however, is empowered to probe, especially when its concern is presidential malfeasance, or the activities of executive branch agencies Congress has created — such agencies, after all, are led by officers subject to Senate confirmation, and Congress both underwrites them with taxpayer funds and limits their operations by statute.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/alarming-escalation-african-american-attacks-joseph-klein/

Anti-Semitic attacks have reached epidemic proportions in the New York metropolitan area. A shooting early last December at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City left several people dead, including two Hasidic Jews. A policeman was also killed by the same shooters nearby. The killers aimed to kill as many Jews as possible before they were struck down. Last Saturday night, five Jewish people were stabbed by a Jew-hater wielding a machete at a Hasidic rabbi’s house in the suburb of Monsey, New York. One of the victims suffered serious head injuries, which has left him in a coma and may result in permanent damage to his brain. Orthodox Jews residing in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg are living in constant fear, triggered by a slew of anti-Semitic incidents that were a near daily occurrence during December and have continued into 2020.

These were not violent crimes committed by white nationalists. While white supremacists continue to pose a major threat to the lives and well-being of Jews and other minority groups nationwide, the alarming series of recent anti-Semitic attacks in the New York metropolitan area were conducted primarily by African Americans.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/stop-blaming-jews-for-anti-semitism/

There have been a number of repulsive articles over the past few weeks blaming New York’s Jews for precipitating violence that is, um, “seen by some” as anti-Semitic. Yet, this piece by NBC News, which insinuates that icky ultra-Orthodox Jews bring some of this misery on themselves by having the temerity to move to the suburbs, might be the most tone-deaf of them all:

For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families pushed out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust. (The irritated italics are mine.)

I grew up in suburban Long Island, a place where nearly every Italian, Irish, and Jewish family I knew had, at some point, moved out of one of New York City’s boroughs to take advantage of “open spaces.” In those days New Yorkers were fleeing rampant criminality, litter, and mismanagement, rather than gentrification and high prices, but it was always about easier living.

Oftentimes, the refugees from the city would import the ethnic character of their neighborhoods to their new towns. Many suburban enclaves were mostly inhabited by one tribe or another, including the predominately Jewish “Five Towns.” Jews — and especially orthodox Jews who won’t drive on Sabbath — live near synagogues and form close-knit communities around them. This is nothing new. Yet no one, as far as I can recall, ever made the argument that Cedarhurst was a modern-day European shtetl.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/addressing_islams_role_in_rising_urban_black_antisemitism.html

Bill DeBlasio insists that Trump’s rhetoric and growing white supremacy are the cause for the increase in the number and intensity of anti-Semitic attacks in New York City and surrounding communities. However, those are peculiar root causes considering that the assailants have consistently been minorities, usually blacks, none of whom are part of the recognized Trump demographic.

Like DeBlasio, Democrat Jews also try to deny this reality, for they find mystifying the fact that the black community they marched arm-in-arm with during the Civil Rights Movement should now turn on them. Their befuddlement and misdirection ignore the role that Islam plays in rising anti-Semitism among an activist segment of Leftist, urban blacks.

Before going any further, let me hasten to state that this post is not meant to accuse American blacks generally of being anti-Semitic. It is meant, however, to investigate one reason behind the reality that a narrow subset of blacks is becoming more violently anti-Semitic.

Andrew Bostom, who has spent decades studying Islam, has issued a series of tweets showing that the anti-Semitism that animates Louis Farrakhan and his supporters has been incubating among urban blacks since the early 1960s. For example, Dr. Bostom quotes from Louis E. Lomax’s When the word is given; a report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim world. (Cleveland, World Pub. Co., 1963, pp. 72-73):

Malcolm [X] has always maintained excellent relations with top Arabs at the United Nations. Few, if any, of these meetings were ever public. But they did occur and there is every indication that they are still going on. The road to Mecca was cleared long before Malcolm and Elijah [Muhammad] left these shores; powerful pro-Nasser Arabs are quietly in Malcolm’s corner, and many Black Muslim bazaars open with the reading of cabled greetings from ‘Our Beloved Brother Gamal Abdel Nasser.’ . . . [B]oth (black) Muslim and Moslem (orthodox Muslims) worship Allah. And that – at least so the hajj committee said – is all that matters. . . . The Black Muslims carefully describe themselves as ‘anti-Zionist’ rather than as against the Jews. (Emphasis mine.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15367/can-taking-cannabis-cause-permanent-harm

Gatestone Institute to examine the impact of legalized marijuana in 2020. Details to follow…

STAY TUNED!-This is a major public health issue……rsk

https://dcwhispers.com/13-hours-vs-13-minutes-thats-the-difference-between-two-presidents-when-it-comes-to-saving-american-lives/

When the Benghazi Massacre was underway, then-President Barack Obama went to sleep. It took 13 hours for help to arrive. Sadly, that was more than enough time for militants to kill and injure Americans, including the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since, ironically, the Iranian attack on the U.S. embassy during the Carter presidency.
This week in Iraq it took President Donald Trump just 13 minutes to give the order for help. The militants quickly scattered and lives were saved.
What a remarkable difference a different Commander in Chief can make when it comes to keeping Americans safe even in the most dangerous parts of the world.