RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20176/trump-ii

Judging by what advisers are preparing on the Middle East, Trump II will focus on “closer ties” with allies, including Israel, and no more “favors” to the Islamic Republic in Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey unless he is back in line.
Trump thinks that Marxists and other “crazy leftists” have seized control of US universities and are brainwashing whole generations thanks to tax-exempt private donations and public funding.
So far the Democrats continue to mock Trump and refuse to take him seriously. This could cost the Democrats dearly. For even if the solutions that Trump suggests appear weird the problems he raises are real.

“He is dangerously close to getting re-elected!” This is how, in a recent issue, the London weekly The Economist presented Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House next year. This was based on a few polls indicating that, if nominated, Trump would have a chance of winning next November.

One must always be careful about predictions, especially by the press.

The Economist put Indonesian’s ruler General Suharto on its cover and predicted he would emerge as the most powerful leader in Asia. Less than a year later, Suharto was swept away by a popular uprising.

However, let us not dismiss the magazine’s prediction about a second presidential term for Trump because, even if he fails to win the nomination, he has already had a lasting impact on American politics.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/25/the-complexity-of-idiocy/

Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks.

For the Left, one oft used word signaling an impending narrative is the word “complexity.” Usage of this word allows the Leftist to cull and, importantly, dispense with whatever facts or allegations they choose to create a narrative. This is critical in instances where the facts at hand lead to an ineluctable conclusion – i.e., the truth – that is antithetical to the Left’s aim. Let us explore four instances of the Left’s “complexity” of idiocy driving a narrative harmful to America and the world.

In American domestic policy, the Left is not content with foisting cancel culture upon the country and coopting the corporate media to control the political debate. The Left wants to silence any dissent to its authoritarian aims. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution recognizes and protects the God-given rights to each citizen of “political rights,” such as free speech. One would think the constitution’s prohibition would be the last word on censorship; but one would be underestimating the Left’s power to pretend the clear prohibition of government censorship is, instead, “complex.”
https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/25/the-complexity-of-idiocy/

Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks.

For the Left, one oft used word signaling an impending narrative is the word “complexity.” Usage of this word allows the Leftist to cull and, importantly, dispense with whatever facts or allegations they choose to create a narrative. This is critical in instances where the facts at hand lead to an ineluctable conclusion – i.e., the truth – that is antithetical to the Left’s aim. Let us explore four instances of the Left’s “complexity” of idiocy driving a narrative harmful to America and the world.

In American domestic policy, the Left is not content with foisting cancel culture upon the country and coopting the corporate media to control the political debate. The Left wants to silence any dissent to its authoritarian aims. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution recognizes and protects the God-given rights to each citizen of “political rights,” such as free speech. One would think the constitution’s prohibition would be the last word on censorship; but one would be underestimating the Left’s power to pretend the clear prohibition of government censorship is, instead, “complex.”

Consequently, as they have on college campuses, the Left has been weaponizing federal and state governments both directly and through colluding with private entities to censor free speech.  Creating the camouflage of “complexity” by pretending there exists a transcendent right not to be “offended” and purporting to be promoting “safety,” the censorious Left’s aim is to cloud the truth that the supreme law of the land prohibits the government from infringing upon Americans’ free speech and all political rights. And no amount of faux complexity can obscure the fact that there is nothing more dangerous than a censor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maryland-hate-crime-commission-official-compares-israel-to-nazi-germany/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Maryland’s attorney general has temporarily suspended an official on the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response who compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a series of social-media posts and claimed that reports of Hamas murdering Jewish babies were “fake.”

Zainab Chaudry is the Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and was appointed to the hate-crime commission by Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown in August. Made up of 20 stakeholder representatives, the group is designed to “develop strategies to prevent and respond to hate crime activity and evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.” The commission’s first annual report to the General Assembly is slated for December 2024 and will detail recommendations on addressing hate crimes.

Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Chaudry made a series of antisemitic social media posts. On October 17, she posted a photo of Israeli flags at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin next to a photo of Nazi Germany flags at the same gate in 1936. She captioned the post: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”

“The Commission must serve as a model for the entire State on how to respond to incidents of hate and bias,” Brown said on Tuesday. “The Commission is facing its first test. How we respond has deep implications. I take this very seriously, and I will do everything possible to bring people together to move forward the critical work of this Commission.”

Directly after Hamas invaded Israel, Chaudry referred to the attack on Facebook as an “uprising in Palestine.” She asked followers to remember that Palestinians “are a people who are illegally occupied.”

“Militarized occupation is inherently evil and violent,” she continued. “The state of Israel was created through the oppression, persecution and subjugation of Palestinians. It sits on the graves of martyrs and people forcibly displaced from their homes, forced to endure humiliation, terror, desecration of their holy spaces.”

Chaudry accompanied her post with a Malcolm X quote: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

On Facebook two days later, Chaudry criticized elected officials for showing “support for an apartheid government that has been waging terror against Palestinians for decades.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/create-a-crime-research-powerhouse

Calls to “reimagine” everything from policing to incarceration have dominated criminal-justice policy circles in recent years, but truly innovative research has been stifled. The federal government should devote more resources to collecting data on criminal incidents and offenders, police, courts, and other facets of public safety.

To start, policymakers should work to improve the consistency and uniformity of data that cities provide. All jurisdictions—encompassing roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies—should report their data to the FBI-run National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS, which became the sole collections system in 2021, improves on past systems by collecting not just broad incident numbers but also such details as date, time, and location, whether offenses were carried out or merely attempted, the relationships between victims and offenders, the presence of drugs, whether the offender was under the influence, gang involvement, and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime. All told, NIBRS reports on 52 discrete offenses.

Though the FBI has distributed $120 million since 2015 to help departments adopt this system, in 2021, about 7,000 police agencies, representing approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population, still did not provide any data. It’s unlikely that the 2022 numbers will be more robust. With more than a third of the country’s crime reporting missing, analysts struggle to draw solid conclusions. Federal authorities should therefore offer carrots and wield sticks to ensure that jurisdictions submit NIBRS data.

Further, Washington should establish a “sentinel cities” program—an idea proposed by crime-data analyst Jeff Asher. Such a program would include about 100 cities, offering them targeted funding to publish statistics on selected offenses, at frequent, synchronized intervals, on an open portal and using a standard data format. Collecting all this baseline information will enable authorities to view and analyze trends.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/21/the-meaning-of-thanksgiving-can-save-america/

Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race-based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

Or maybe, fable or not, it is an inspiring message of unity for a nation of settlers and immigrants who have created a place where everyone, including descendants of the Indians, have enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the history of the world. That’s a debate we have to wage, and one we cannot lose. Like all nations and tribes, America has had dark moments. But the good overwhelms the bad. It’s not even close.

The attempted destruction of America’s self-confidence and unity by its own institutions, however, which must be challenged and overcome, must not distract from an even bigger problem. America’s institutions have also launched a propaganda campaign, growing in intensity every year, that claims we face an existential climate crisis, and massive sacrifices are necessary to cope. This is a lie.

It’s particularly relevant to reflect on this fraud during Thanksgiving, because our nation of settlers and immigrants would not exist if the types of rules and restrictions being imposed on Americans today were in effect 400 years ago. And it gives rise to a fundamental conflict: We continue to invite immigrants from around the world to move here, but thanks to extreme environmentalist restrictions, we are unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-other-crises-demanding-our-attention/

Israel’s battle to neutralize Hamas has dominated our collective attention, as it should. For all of its existence, Israel has been the canary in the mine shaft, the West’s beleaguered outpost of political freedom, tolerance, and equality in the midst of illiberal and tyrannical enemies that want to destroy the West’s power and influence. As Israelis have said over the past month, Israel’s fight is our fight, and always has been.

Yet our country is at a dangerous crossroads, with other threats both at home and abroad that demand our attention, and that should be the focus of next year’s elections. We are at the point where democracy’s historically bad habit of kicking multiple cans down the road is becoming unsustainable, if not lethal.

The Ukraine Stalemate

You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the Russo-Ukrainian war would become a stalemate redolent of the Western Front in World War I. For all the self-congratulation of the Nato countries about standing up to Vladimir Putin and protecting the “rules-based world order,” their money and materiel have been just enough to create the current stasis.

We seem to be pursuing a Mr. Micawber foreign policy, waiting for “something to turn up,” like a coup in Russia, to get us out of this quagmire. But more-realist commentators are casting doubt on Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia and recovering their purloined territories.

In the U.S., the policy positions have settled into a bipartisan contrast: America First isolationism and a “no more costly endless wars abroad” sentiment vs. “aggression must be checked and deterred” by intervention lest we incentivize other aggressors to try conclusions. The result is the choice still facing us, between the bad and the worse.

Yet this debate is an exercise in shutting the barn door after the horse got out. The real story here is how our feckless foreign policy in the Nineties assumed that in a post-Soviet world we could enjoy the “peace dividend” and cut our defense spending.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/11/20/alan-dershowitz-alleged-rise-of-islamophobia-at-universities-fake-n4924086

On the latest episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News, famed lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz scoffed at the idea that there’s a rise of Islamophobia on college campuses today.

“Let me ask you this, Alan — we have a very big bureaucracy. We have a huge Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. We have a huge Civil Rights Division and another big bureaucracy called the Department of Education,” began host Mark Levin. “Donald Trump signed an executive order, which gives those authorities the power to act against anti-Semitism and threats on college campuses. Maybe they’re doing it here and there. I’m not seeing a big push. I’m not hearing from the attorney general. I’m not hearing from the head of either Civil Rights Division. What the hell is going on?”

Dershowitz explained how he was at the White House when Trump announced the executive order and how he congratulated him on it despite the fact Dershowitz is not a Republican. 

“I congratulated him for his great efforts in getting the administration behind this effort to root out anti-Semitism,” he said. “It hasn’t worked. In fact, what’s happened, and it’s this administration and Biden as well, whenever they talk about anti-Semitism, they say, ‘and Islamophobia.’ I’ve got news for you. There is no Islamophobia at any university in the United States. It’s a fake. It’s virtue parading. Oh, we have to fight anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Let me tell you who the anti-Semites are. They are largely, not completely, the radical Muslims who claim to be victims of Islamophobia. This is a one-sided issue.”

In fact, real incidents of Islamophobia are so hard to come by that a Palestinian man in Ohio faked an Islamophobic hate crime last month. Unfortunately, too many people on the left choose to pretend this isn’t a one-sided issue.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/22/democracy-dies-in-darkness-dems-overwhelmingly-back-big-tech-govt-censorship-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have come to realize that being online can mean having your speech rights curtailed. But that doesn’t mean they like it. Indeed, they mostly oppose the idea, in particular when it’s Big Tech and Big Government censoring together, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

With growing complaints over online censorship, the online national I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Nov. 1-3, asked 1,400 respondents the following question: “Do you approve or disapprove of Big Tech companies working with federal agencies to engage in online censorship?”

For most people, the answer is negative. Of those who responded, 43% say they either disapproved of government and large tech and social media firms cooperating with each other to curb Americans’ speech “strongly” (26%) or “somewhat” (17%).

By comparison, 36% say they approve of it “strongly” (18%) or “somewhat” (18%). A significantly large group, 22%, say they were “not sure.”

The poll has a +/-2.7 percentage point margin of error.

But, the relative closeness of the response is deceptive. When broken down by demographics and political affiliation, surprisingly sharp differences between and within different groups emerge.

Start with politics. Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Big Tech and Big Government censoring online content, 57% “approve” to just 25% “disapprove.”

Compare that with Republicans, who are almost exactly the opposite of the Dems in their response: 26% “approve,” vs. 54% “disapprove.” Similarly, independents “approve” by just 21%, while they “disapprove” by 52%. Republicans and independents are nearly identical, while Democrats are the outlier.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-hamas-became-an-environmentalist-and-gun-control-cause/

From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas Nazi cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.

The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas Nazis.

How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”

The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.

Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.