RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/thanksgiving-day-another-front-leftist-war-america-bruce-thornton-0/

For going on a century, the international Left has been seeking to discredit and undermine the United States. One front in this war comprises attacks on American history, monuments, and the traditional holidays that recognize and celebrate this country’s exceptional institutions, especially political and economic freedom, and the unalienable rights of individuals.

Having failed serially and ruined every country it has governed, the Left has a deep hatred for the nation and principles that achieved what socialism could only promise. Defending our national traditions, then, is not about time off from work, shopping, overeating, and binging on football, but about our being grateful for our freedom, and the importance of the history of our nation’s beginning.

Given the Left’s long animus, there’s no surprise in a story about several American universities gathering at an event that asks whether Americans should “reconsider” and “reevaluate”  Thanksgiving. According to the event’s advertising,

Starting in 1970, many Americans, led by Indigenous protesters, believed that Thanksgiving should be rededicated as a National Day of Mourning to reflect the centuries-long displacement and persecution of Native Americans. The recent shift from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day reflects a changing national mood. . . .  “Should Americans reconsider Thanksgiving when wrestling with our country’s complicated past?”

Such thinking reflects leftist revisionist history of the Howard Zinn and 1619 Project ilk, which in fact doesn’t correct the alleged partial and partisan historical record of America’s birth and scrub away its self-justifying myths, but rather simply replaces that history with an even more egregiously mythic one that violates every historiographical canon, especially the requirement that we avoid presentism––judging the past by the ideologically tainted standards of today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-democrats-ruin-everything-the-new-york-times/

This New York Times video doesn’t exactly shout, “Vote Republican” because everyone involved in it, and everyone it is aimed at, is a Democrat. But if Democrats can mess things up this badly, what other conclusion are we supposed to draw? Democrats make things worse is the resounding message here. I agree, except unlike the production team of the video, I don’t find this baffling.

The message of the video is that Democrats are hypocrites who don’t live up to their values. Of course they don’t! But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that they make everything worse. Watch the video. It’ll knock you out that this came from the Times.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/five-moderate-dem-senators-reject-bidens-pick-for-top-bank-watchdog/

Five prominent moderate Democratic senators have vowed to reject President Biden’s nominee, Saule Omarova, for the nation’s top bank watchdog role over her aggressive approach to regulating the financial sector.

Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee Jon Tester, Mark Warner, and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), as well as Democratic Senators John Hickenlooper and Mark Kelly have all declared their opposition to Omarova as head of Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Biden officials still endorse Omarova, even though her confirmation is increasingly unlikely given these lawmakers’ disapproval.

“The White House continues to strongly support her historic nomination,” a White House official told Axios.

“Saule Omarova is eminently qualified for this position,” the official added. “She has been treated unfairly since her nomination with unacceptable red-baiting from Republicans like it’s the McCarthy era.”

The former law professor drew criticism from Republicans during a congressional hearing last week for her past academic works in which she advocated to “end banking as we know it.” Her position would preside over lenders holding an extremely high value of assets. Senator Kennedy grilled her over her purported praise of a number of economic practices exercised by the Soviet Union.

https://www.city-journal.org/noncitizen-voting-devalues-citizenship

New York City’s political leaders are prepared to extend the franchise to noncitizens by creating a new class of persons called “municipal voters.” These new voters would include Legal Permanent Residents—LPRs, known familiarly as “green card” holders—and other noncitizens “authorized to work in the United States.” Municipal voters would be permitted to vote in all local elections, including primary, general, and special elections for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, city council, borough president, and in local ballot initiatives. They would not be permitted to cast ballots in state or federal elections.

About 37 percent of New York City residents were born abroad. The majority of these more than 3 million people are naturalized citizens, entitled to vote in any election, assuming they meet the requirements of being 18 years old and not currently in prison or on parole. The “municipal voter” legislation would apply to the 650,000 LPRs in New York City and approximately 150,000 others who hold employment-eligible visas, or who have received “deferred action” status under DACA.

New York City has about 5.6 million registered voters, 90 percent of whom are considered “active.” Expanding the rolls by another 800,000 voters would potentially create a major new voting bloc, though it is not clear that these voters would be especially motivated to go to the polls. Voter turnout in New York City, especially in local elections, is extraordinarily thin, with typically less than 20 percent of registered voters bothering to take the trouble; one imagines that noncitizens would have even less engagement in the process. The effects on some council races, however, could be meaningful: the noncitizen population is distributed unequally around the city, so districts in parts of Queens or the Bronx with populations more than 50 percent noncitizen could see a much greater impact than other areas of the city with higher concentrations of citizens.

Allowing noncitizens to vote was normal in the early years of the American republic, though New York State ended the practice in 1804. Arkansas was the last state to abolish alien voting in 1926. In the wake of the 1968 teachers’ strike, New York City opened voting for local school boards to all residents, on the premise that noncitizen parents of schoolchildren ought to have a say in how their schools were run. But school boards were abolished in 2002, when direct control of the Department of Education was concentrated under the mayor, and the city’s experiment with noncitizen voting ended then, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/opinion/liberals-survive-progressivism.html

It’s been nearly 30 years since then-Gov. Bill Clinton took a break from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of death-row inmate Ricky Ray Rector. Morally, it may have been repugnant to kill a man so mentally handicapped by a failed suicide attempt that he set aside the pecan pie of his last meal because he was “saving it for later.”

Politically, it was essential.

By the early 1990s the American left had spent a generation earning a soft-on-crime image in an era of growing lawlessness. In 1988, Mike Dukakis secured the Democrats’ third landslide loss thanks in no small part to his stalwart opposition to the death penalty. Four years later, it was difficult to imagine any Democrat reaching the White House without a literal blood sacrifice to the gods of law and order.

Now Democrats seem intent on reviving that reputation. In Waukesha, Wis., six people were killed and at least 60 injured when Darrell Brooks drove his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade, according to the police. Brooks already had a lengthy rap sheet and had reportedly run over a woman with the same S.U.V. early this month. But, as The Times reported, he had been “quickly freed from jail on bond after prosecutors requested what they now say was an inappropriately low bail.”

What happened in Waukesha on Sunday is among the consequences of easy bail. And bail reform — that is, reducing or eliminating cash bail for a variety of offenses — has been a cause of the left for years.

Then there is California, which in 2014 classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.

In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”

As for the rest of the country: Can anyone seriously say that Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia or New York has been improved in recent years under progressive leadership? Why did rates of homelessness register their biggest jumps between 2007 and 2020 in left-leaning states like New York, California and Massachusetts — and their biggest decreases in right-leaning ones like Florida, Texas and Georgia?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/11/23/the-lefts-vigilantes-n1535953

Who would have thought that “across state lines” would have replaced “Donald Trump” as the Left’s favorite epithet? But whatever fans the flames, right? Anything to get the latest rounds of arson, looting and violence up and running. There’s a country to be destroyed, you know.

If you watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which originally aired what seems like a hundred years ago, you may recognize the name Shelby Foote. He was a Civil War historian who made frequent appearances during the series. He was very knowledgeable and his books are enjoyable to read. Like C.S. Lewis, Foote has a way of crafting a sentence that keeps you hooked and somehow is pleasing to the eye. Of course, given Foote’s southern origin, many critics automatically label him a Confederate apologist, without taking the time to see the nuance in Foote’s books. Foote tried to tell both sides of a story. And history can be messy and does not always favor the side in which we are interested. But then again, nuance is all but lost in the 21st century.

In the book Confederates in the Attic, author Tony Horowitz sat down with Foote for an interview and the subject of the Confederate flag came up. Foote commented:

“Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”

And so it goes. The “right-thinking” people of the Left would never sully their hands in dealing with their enemies directly. Even if they do not explicitly encourage burning car dealerships, looting stores, attacking police stations or beating up unsuspecting people on the street, they know that their rhetoric inspires and encourages it. They know that they have an army of angry, under-educated or willfully uneducated group of people, highly vulnerable to the power of suggestion — people who will burn down a city while Leftist leaders and media mavens gather at the Kennedy Center or the Met Gala to sip champagne as their colleagues and errand-runners try to convince us that a building engulfed in flames is a sign of a peaceful protest.

People who they hate are being attacked by people they care nothing about. Just like their enemies, their foot soldiers are inconsequential and expendable. And if a neighborhood has to lose small businesses or a supermarket, drug store, or for that matter lives, so be it. After all, the goal is just, right?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/22/i-hope-you-die-the-murderous-isis-jihadi-from-new-york-city-you-heard-nothing-about-n1535561

Ali Saleh, 28, was born and raised in the Jamaica, Queens neighborhood of New York City, in idyllic circumstances: according to court documents, he came “from a loving home, surrounded by parents and siblings, and was both educated and employed.” Yet despite the fact that we are constantly told that ignorance and deprivation cause terrorism, Saleh’s enviable upbringing didn’t prevent him from turning to the dark side. Wednesday, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison after pleading guilty to aiding the Islamic State (ISIS). He gives every indication of being as hardcore an adherent as the jihad terror organization ever had. And one question that no one seems to be asking is: Where did he get these ideas in Queens?

In addition to the 30 years for aiding ISIS, Saleh was also sentenced Wednesday to eight years and four months in prison for assaulting a federal correctional officer. According to the Justice Department, “on July 13, 2018, at approximately 12:35 p.m., while a senior correctional officer was retrieving trash through an access slot of Saleh’s cell, Saleh reached through the slot and slashed the officer with an improvised knife, lacerating the officer’s right forearm and damaging the officer’s radial nerve.  Saleh smiled at the officer and said, ‘I hope you die.’” Charming guy.

That was after Saleh amassed a long record of support for the world’s most brutal and murderous jihad terror group. Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, stated that “Saleh made numerous attempts to travel overseas to join ISIS, and when those efforts failed, attempted to assist others in joining the terrorist organization.”

Saleh made his loyalties abundantly clear. On July 10, 2014, he wrote online: “We are going to see a lot of be headings [sic] of American soldiers and I want front row seats.” Then on August 25, 2014, he declared: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.” Three days later, he added: “Lets [sic] be clear the Muslims in the khilafah [caliphate] need help, the one who is capable to go over and help the Muslims must go and help.” He also wrote: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.”