RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-left-should-be-careful-with-its-riot-rhetoric/

“Justice excuses violence” is a self-destructive maxim that risks producing new atrocities.

Last week, the nation was stunned by the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle decried the slaying, and it didn’t take long for protestors across the country to take to the streets. Sadly, some recent anti-brutality protests have devolved into seemingly random displays of theft, property damage, arson, and assault. Yet through all this chaos and destruction, the Left has not found much to condemn with regard to the rioters. Indeed, left-wing intellectuals have tended either to explain away the crimes of violent protestors or to justify them as righteous and inevitable.

Before considering the implications of such rhetoric, some examples of its prevalence might be useful. On Saturday, Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher argued in Slate magazine that “the destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one . . . property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party and the Stonewall Riots.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist who recently received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project, tweeted out a more subtle endorsement of the riots: “I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for [black] Americans.” Perhaps Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has mustered the moral will to condemn the violence and destruction of the radical left? Quite the contrary — the furthest Biden has gone is to state that burning down communities is “needless” and unnecessary.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/dominating-the-streets/

Right now providing security must be a higher priority than law enforcement.

Since the revolution in policing that began in the early 1990s, we have had a generation of peace and prosperity. Without the rule of law — i.e., without order, without the presumption that the laws will be enforced — that kind of societal flourishing is not possible.

We are seeing now what happens when the rule of law breaks down. It is frightening, but it is hardly unprecedented, even in modern history. Bryan Burrough’s spellbinding history Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I reviewed for NR about five years ago, reminds us that in 1972 alone, there were 1,900 bombings in the United States, carried out, for the most part, by domestic terrorist groups and enraged individual American citizens. Regrettably, the radical “small-c communists” were not ultimately regarded as the sociopaths that they were. They eroded public support for our war effort in Vietnam, wrote the history in which they were lionized as social-justice icons against racist America, and triumphantly marched into academe, where they have taught and influenced the sociopaths who are making mayhem today.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.