RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/10/the-treason-of-the-intellectuals-the-undoing-of-thought/

Last week, the commentator Lee Smith had me on “Words That Matter,” his show for Epoch TV. He had recently come across an essay I had written some thirty years ago about Julien Benda’s 1927 book La Trahison des clercs, “the treason of the intellectuals,” and was struck by its contemporary relevance. We covered a lot of ground in the half hour allotted to us. The show will air in a week or two.  I hope you will watch it.  In the meantime, I share the original essay, with some modifications, below. 

“When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.”
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

“Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re- establishing our former ignorance?”
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99)

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said “famous,” but perhaps “once famous” would be more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. “La trahison des clercs” is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are, in this sense, “clercs.” The English translation, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” sums it up neatly.

The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short, in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, “Humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/09/liberal-elites-against-democracy/

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump’s core legal argument—state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged “insurrectionists” absent specific implementing legislation from Congress—is nothing short of remarkable.

For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal “experts” assured us that the 14th Amendment “insurrection clause” argument for Trump’s ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump’s removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart turned Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court’s logic was “masterful,” “brilliant,” and “unassailable.” Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for “unassailable” logic!

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/lessons_for_the_future_republic.html

Victor Davis Hanson and Dennis Prager are keen observers of American society.  Like honored physicians who examine the body politic for disease, they expertly diagnose what ails our country.  What they say and write matters.  It is significant, then, when both reach the conclusion that the United States is disintegrating.  

In an essay entitled “American Paralysis and Decline,” Hanson begins by quoting Roman historian Livy: “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.”  He then walks us through America’s open border crisis, unsustainable debt, epidemic of crime, and weaponization of the criminal justice system.  In every instance, he argues, Americans know that the disease is killing us, yet we lack the courage to choose the proper remedy.  Instead, our tormentors bully us into submission with meaningless taunts that we are politically incorrect, racist, nativist, uncaring, cruel, or bad Christians.  As the Roman Republic collapsed in Livy’s time, Hanson worries that the American Republic will fall during his.  When societies “are so paralyzed by their fear that the road to salvation becomes too painful to even contemplate,” he concludes, “they implode gradually, then suddenly.”

Within days of Hanson’s essay, Prager published an essay entitled “The Left-Right Divide Is Not Bridgeable.”  Whereas Hanson’s essay diagnoses America as suffering from a state of “paralysis” in which we are unable to confront what is destroying us, Prager recognizes that even if we were able to snap into action, we are entirely too divided to heal ourselves.  “Millions of Americans,” he begins, “harbor a wish that something or someone can bridge” our ideological divisions.  That wish is “understandable” but a total “fantasy.”  He then takes us through a compendium of symptoms that spell doom for the Union.  Americans sharply disagree about such fundamental issues as biological sex, colorblind meritocracy, Hamas terrorism, childhood sexualization, law enforcement, free speech, respect for opposing points of view, and the nature of democracy.  “Today’s left-right divide is at least as great as the North-South divide before and during the Civil War,” Prager laments.  “The only thing that remains the same is that it was the Democratic Party that opposed freedom then, and it is the Democratic Party that opposes freedom today.”  

Note the common warning from both Hanson’s and Prager’s respective diagnoses: American society is showing identical symptoms to societies that disintegrated into civil war.  Both are plainly saying that, although we have detected the cancer destroying us, we have failed to treat it in time.  The options still available to us are grotesque: amputation, debilitation, or even death.  It is no longer clear that the patient can be saved or, if it is saved, whether it will resemble anything like its former self.  Will the American Republic, like the Roman Republic, become a dictatorship and a slowly dying empire?  Many would say we are already far along that path.  Will Americans descend into such bloodshed as to destroy the Union for good?  Many might agree that the U.S. government’s aiding and abetting of the criminal invasion at our borders has already precipitated so many drug-related or violent deaths as to constitute civil war.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/08/it-is-time-for-europe-to-stop-the-fearmongering-about-a-second-trump-presidency/

Griping by the European elite about a second Trump presidency has reached a fever pitch that is so bad that it borders on attempts to influence the 2024 presidential election.

The UK’s Economist magazine is in full panic mode about the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, calling Trump “the biggest danger to the world in 2024” and lamenting that Democrats do not have a “plan B” to stop Trump.

London’s Guardian newspaper has called Trump “a clear and present danger to the UK’s vital interests in a way no previous US president has ever been.”

France’s LeMonde newspaper has called Trump’s comeback “as embarrassing as it is worrying for American democracy.”

Other Europeans have called for “Trump-proofing” European foreign policy before Mr. Trump possibly takes office next January.

European elitists despised Donald Trump as president because he was a populist who bucked conventional wisdom and challenged Europe. He pressured European states for fair trade with the U.S. and to meet their NATO treaty obligations on defense spending. He justifiably ridiculed European states—especially Germany—for becoming dependent on Russian energy and withdrew from the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline. European states were irate with Trump for withdrawing from bad agreements and treaties, such as the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and the Paris Climate Accord.

European leaders have always hated brash American presidents who act unilaterally without the consent of Europe and the United Nations. This was especially true concerning Donald Trump, whose strong leadership and America First foreign policies drove them crazy.

Europe was therefore greatly relieved when Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because he shared their liberal ideologies and establishment views on foreign policy. Biden would work through the UN and defer to Europe. There would be no foreign policy surprises. Europe knew it could control Biden.

The European elite was initially ecstatic with the Biden presidency. Biden immediately rejoined the Paris Climate Accord and designated climate change as the primary threat to U.S. national security. The Biden Administration aggressively promoted the far-left “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology and forced it on the U.S. military. Biden initiated talks to revive the JCPOA. European leaders were delighted by Biden’s sophomoric declarations in 2021 that “America is back” under his presidency. French President Macron happily welcomed Biden to the “European Club.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ny-sends-national-guard-into-subways/

The official media messaging is that crime is at “record lows”. New York City media types smugly post selfies while denying that there’s any violence in the city.

And then the governor sends the National Guard to the subway. The subways are officially a war zone.

Nearly 1,000 New York National Guardsmen, state police and MTA cops are being deployed to carry out bag checks in the Big Apple’s crime-ridden subway system, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday.

The additional forces — made up of 750 guardsmen and 250 law enforcement officers — will work alongside the NYPD to patrol “the city’s busiest transit stations” amid a recent surge in underground violence, Hochul said.

“These brazen, heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated,” Hochul said as she announced a five-point plan to crack down on the city’s burgeoning underground crime wave.

It’s historic… in the worst possible way.

This is the sort of thing Mexico has been doing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judith-butler-says-october-7-was-neither-antisemitic-nor-a-terrorist-attack/?utm_source=

Judith Butler, the American gender theorist, said that the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was “not a terrorist attack” and “not an antisemitic attack,” but an “uprising” and “armed resistance.”

Butler told a panel discussion in France, hosted by Paroles d’Honneur, that she “did not like that attack,” which was “anguishing” and “terrible,” but that she would be “very foolish” if she “then decided that the only violence in the scene was the violence done to Israeli people. The violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus.”

Revealingly, she added, “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party. We can have different views about armed resistance.”

Can we? Can reasonable people have “different views” about whether it is okay to murder civilians, including young children and the elderly, kidnap them, or subject young women to rape and sexual violence? One doesn’t expect Judith Butler to make much sense, but this is a new low, even for her.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/03/the-wit-to-gall-all-the-right-enemies/

EXCERPTS

Most journalists are on the political left. They are either sinister, invested in the collapse of Western values, or they are useful idiots wedded to an ideology that has long since been taken over by Marxism, green zealotry and wokeism. Nothing can be expected from them, it seems, other an abiding compulsion never to acknowledge the positives about Donald Trump.

He seals up the southern border, he boldly deregulates, he makes America energy independent, he reduces black unemployment to its lowest-ever level, he gets NATO countries to increase their defence spending, he moves the US Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, he establishes the Abraham (peace) Accords in the Middle East, he appoints genuine judges rather than partisan hacks to the courts, and so on and so on. Achievement after achievement. All daggers in the heart of the Left. All pooh-poohed by the prissies because of Trump’s mean tweets.

President Biden had his annual medical last week. A few physical ailments aside — reflux, a stiff gait etc. — he passed with flying colours apparently. According to his White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, he didn’t need to take a cognitive test as part of his medical because he effectively passes one each day at work. Some commentators on Fox News have in the past queried Ms Jean-Pierre’s own cognitive ability. That’s unfair. You can’t spin, dissemble and lie with a straight face time after time, without respite, without having your wits about you. I mean you have to recall how you lied about something last time, and the time before, to do it again faultlessly. No mean feat.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20462/us-government-sixth-columnists

We have heard of Fifth Columnists — “a group of people who support the enemies of the country they live in and secretly help them,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary.

It sometimes appears as if there are American elected officials, such as Reps. Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal, veering in that direction. They recently made an “under the radar” (meaning secret?) visit to Cuba and returned to plead the case — not for the human rights of the starving, destitute Cuban people — but for the human rights of the dictators causing them to be starving and destitute. They also both voted “no” to House Resolution 760,
“Expressing solidarity with Cuban citizens demonstrating peacefully for fundamental freedoms, condemning the Cuban regime’s acts of repression, and calling for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained Cuban citizens.”

Increasingly, there appear to be federal employees, US Representatives and Senators, judges, political appointees, and the vice president take this sacred Oath of Office — but who then abrogate it:

“I, ___, do solemnly swear [or affirm] that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

The president’s oath, required by Article 2, Section 1, of the US Constitution, is:

“I do solemnly swear [or affirm] that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Hence, we see increasingly see US officials allowing open borders; more than 100,000 Americans being killed by fentanyl from China each year, a number greater than all the US service members killed in Afghanistan, the Korean War and the Iraq War combined; turning a blind eye to Chinese Communist Party espionage and purchases of nearly 400,000 acres of farmland throughout America, often next to sensitive US military bases; Iran-backed proxy groups, including the Houthis, launching more than 150 attacks on US service members just since October, with no serious adverse consequences, and Iran about to possess nuclear weapons.