RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/when_woke_is_more_sacred_than_old_glory.html

On my desk is a framed political cartoon with the caption: “Burning the American Flag is a form of free speech? Try burning a rainbow flag and see if that too is considered a form of free speech?” You could replace “rainbow flag” with “BLM flag,” or even “Antifa flag.” The cartoon lances the recent rise in free-speech hypocrisy that promptly abandons the First Amendment and drums up hysterical charges of “hate speech” when certain sacred cows du jour are so much as mildly criticized.

In the Left’s campaign to “fundamentally transform” America and rid it of soi-disant racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other perceived ills, certain symbols — the American flag, and a panoply of images of western culture — have been isolated as representative of “the white patriarchy,” deserving of derision and destruction. Therefore, it has become perfectly acceptable to desecrate them. At the same time, it has become hateful to even give a disapproving look to banners or murals representing the LGBTQ+, militant black groups, or anything remotely leftist. “Woke” symbols are untouchable; free speech be damned.

Quite a few incidents point to this bizarre dual trend, which aims to crush American ideals underfoot and ridicule — even eradicate — the patriotic emotions true Americans have honestly felt and nurtured in their hearts while forcing them by propaganda and law to embrace ideas their hearts have always militated against. The U.S. flag has been a symbol of freedom and justice for over 225 years and represents the American people in vibrant plurality: e pluribus unum, not one constituency or point of view. It also honors all those who fought and died to preserve our freedom and liberty. So, it has obviously been a prime target of America’s enemies within.

On Memorial Day in 2016, veteran Robert Rosebrock was criminally charged for displaying two four-by-six American flags on the fence outside a Veteran Affairs facility in West Los Angeles and faced up to six months in jail. Says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which successfully defended Rosebrock, “Why in the world would the feds prosecute a 74-year-old veteran over the placement of two small American flags at the entrance to a park honoring veterans on Memorial Day?”

In 2019, air force veteran Robert Huey was denied permission by his homeowners association (HOA) to fly an American flag at his residence in South Carolina. Huey, who is suing the HOA, had researched the association’s rules before buying the house and found no prohibitions against displaying the American flag. He is now fighting a case for the freedom to broadcast his love for the country.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-adl-chiefs-disingenuous-epiphany-about-left-wing-anti-semitism/

(July 13, 2021 / JNS) It’s a sad day when the head of the Anti-Defamation League receives accolades for acknowledging that anti-Semitism “also” hails from the left. If the person in question had been living in a cave until last week—when he published an op-ed in Newsweek called “It’s Time to Admit It: The Left Has an Anti-Semitism Problem”—he might be excused for having an epiphany about a phenomenon that has been obvious for decades.
But Jonathan Greenblatt hasn’t been in isolation for the past six years, when he replaced Abraham Foxman as CEO of the Jewish organization, established in 1913 by B’nai B’rith. On the contrary, he’s been as active a participant in American political culture throughout his current tenure as he was during his term in the White House as special assistant to former President Barack Obama.

It is thus that Jews across the spectrum viewed the ADL’s announcement in November 2014 that he would be taking over the reins from Foxman in July 2015 as “dramatic.” Unlike Foxman, a liberal but an indefatigable defender of Israel, Greenblatt’s love for the Jewish state was and still is conditional on its policies—particularly those of the government under former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
His attitude is par for an ardent Democrat whose subsequent loathing for former President Donald Trump made his feelings about Netanyahu pale in comparison. Nor was his mission to transform the ADL into an NGO devoted to a distorted version of tikkun olam, a Jewish concept of making the world a better place that morphed over the years into a branch of “woke-ism” that bears no resemblance to its original meaning.
Nor was combating the globe’s evils the founding purpose of the ADL. That emerged during the trial of American Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, who was lynched by an angry mob two years after he was wrongly convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta.
At the time, the severe anti-Semitism that gripped the U.S. South emanated particularly from white racists who hated Jews and blacks in equal measure. They saw the Jewish community and members of the press mobilize on behalf of Frank as proof that Jews control the world and certainly the media.
The irony is inescapable here since Frank’s key champion was The New York Times. And the idea behind the ADL was that when anti-Semitism is allowed to thrive, the rest of society is in trouble—not that Jew-hatred is one among many forms of racism.

What a difference a century makes.

Today, it’s not white supremacists who pose a threat to Jews in particular and society as a whole, but rather movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Students for Justice in Palestine. There’s a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with the identity of the targets of abhorrent positions and behavior. It is, rather, the fact that the former is on the fringe, while the latter is completely mainstream.

Greenblatt’s piece on Thursday, then, was more deserving of ridicule than praise.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/11/trump-winds-and-biden-whirlwinds/

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin? 

Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth? 

What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?

What is the common denominator of the Lt. General Michael Flynn debacle, the unmasking and leaking of surveilled American citizens, the nonstop politicized commentaries of retired military officers, and the weaponization of the intelligence agencies? What binds together the text trove of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the cleansing of FBI cell phones, or the forgeries of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith?

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

Since when did regaining a House majority equate to impeaching a president on the eve of a reelection campaign, with his future and fiercest campaign opponents possibly as senators to be sitting in judgment on him in any Senate trial? What was common to all the “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” mythologies regarding meetings with Russians in Trump Tower, or mysterious “pings” of Trump tower machines automatically communicating with Russians, or the certain impending indictments of the Trump family?