RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On January 6, 2024 near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, President Biden opened his 2024 election campaign: “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about.” Politico, the left-leaning digital newspaper, reported last month that comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler had become routine for the Biden campaign. Dean Karayanis, in the January 5th edition of The York Sun, wrote: “When an incumbent president swings that brickbat, though, it raises the stakes to a dangerous level.” And Perry Bacon of The Washington Post, who believes the issue is legitimate, wrote in a recent column that such a focus “sidelines other important issues,” that a “general election is in many ways a national conversation between citizens.” But it also trivializes the horrors inflicted by Hitler and the Nazi regime. And remember, Hitler’s Nazis controlled the press and the universities. Trump and the Republicans do not.

Let me state at the outset, if Donald Trump were to be elected next November, which I hope he is not, our democracy would not be at risk. In the January issue of The Spectator, Roger Kimball wrote: “At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimate freedom belongs only to the state.” Trump is a bloviating blowhard, but he would not destroy democracy, even if that were his desire which I don’t believe it is. What would happen is that the mechanics of government would slow, and possibly grind to halt. Even before Trump took office in January 2017, the false Russian collusion hoax had been concocted by the Clinton campaign, which hampered his administration. Millions of dollars were spent on the Mueller investigation that unearthed no collusion, except that between the Clinton campaign and the F.B.I. Two impeachments were attempted; both failed for lack of evidence. Attempts by the Trump Administration to clean up the intelligence communities were stymied. Recall Senator Chuck Schumer’s prescient comments to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on January 3, 2017, when he insisted that Trump was really dumb for attacking the intelligence agencies: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” The unarmed rag-tag gang of men and women who entered the capital on January 6 slowed but did not stop the wheels of government. What Biden and his Progressive buddies have done, in reverting to the campaign slogan that democracy is at risk, is to lift a page from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who said that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will believe it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-protesters-target-manhattan-cancer-hospital/

Pro-Palestinian protesters holding signs that read “Healthcare Workers for Free Palestine” hurled insults at Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on Monday.

Within Our Lives Palestine organized Monday’s “Flood Manhattan for Gaza MLK Day march for healthcare.” Hundreds of people marched past the cancer center, which is also a pediatric hospital, as part of the protest.

“In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ we stand with the Palestinian people amid a grave healthcare crisis amidst the genocide in Gaza,” Within Our Lives said on Instagram.

Videos of the march show children inside Sloan Kettering watching from windows as protesters scream “shame” at them.

“Make sure they hear you; they’re in the windows,” a female organizer of the protest said.

With signs that read “Honor the martyrs of Palestine” and “NYC city workers for Palestine,” the group also marched past the United Nations, the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Starbucks (“Starbucks, you can’t hide; you make drinks for human genocide”), and McDonald’s (“McDonald’s, you can’t hide; you make meals for genocide”).

“What about refusing to acknowledge an attack on Palestinian people, and especially the healthcare system, shows any form of compassion or respect for health?” one speaker said during the protest.

“Shame, shame, shame,” protesters shouted in turn.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/crime-and-history

In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s shimmering portrait of 1980s New York, Sherman McCoy’s father offers his son the following advice: if you want to live in the city, “you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate” yourself from crime and disorder. “The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant,” Wolfe writes. “If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?”

Academics are hardly less self-interested than Wall Street bond traders like the fictional McCoy. Indeed, scholars who hope to thrive in the American historical profession should “insulate, insulate, insulate” themselves from unfashionable topics—especially the crime crisis that plagued American cities in the last third of the twentieth century. If you can earn honors and accolades by condemning the carceral state and “warrior policing,” why venture into the vexing subjects of predatory crime or the crime-control strategies of the police?

Problem is, from the 1960s to the 1990s, urban crime was among the most significant domestic issues in the United States. It was an urgent matter of national concern, contributing to the changing complexion of our cities and to a political realignment that shapes our politics today. Yet scholars of recent U.S. history tend to downplay crime, either by minimizing its significance or by overzealously criticizing cops and the courts.

The reason for this is obvious, though rarely expressed. Left-wing intellectuals do not want us thinking too much about urban crime. When crime throws American cities into disarray—as has happened before and in some places is happening now—it is a bad look for the Left.  

Start with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, one of the most influential scholarly books of the twenty-first century. Mass incarceration, Alexander writes, “is a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racial control,” designed perpetually to harm people of color—a “racial caste system.” Yet Alexander’s book should be infamous for its well-documented flaws. She defines “mass incarceration” as broadly as possible to make the problem seem worse than it is—she considers those on probation or parole, or awaiting sentencing, to be “incarcerated.” She doesn’t point out that in the early 1960s, violent crime began rising sharply along with nonviolent drug crimes. She doesn’t acknowledge that nonwhites drove the three-decade crime climb, or that urban African Americans are more likely to be victimized by crime, which is why many blacks supported the punitive crime measures she decries.