RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/what_to_do_and_why_it_matters.html

Among the sharp-witted reader comments that come my way, some clonk me on the head with reasonable gripes that take a couple of forms: (1) sure, Shurk, the country is a mess, but what precisely are we going to do about it?  Or more despondently: (2) Given how awful everything is, how could anything we do possibly matter?

I would like to address the second question first by stating emphatically: what you do matters tremendously.  Your efforts influence others in ways you may never know.

As but a single illustration of this truth, consider this message from a young woman that was reposted to a comment thread at The Conservative Treehouse:

My heart goes out to the men and women who have been awake for years if not decades.  I cannot imagine the frustration and hopelessness you must have felt when you were literally watching the world burn with no one to talk to.  We’re here now and we are awake.  Sorry we’re late.

If those fifty words don’t give you a bit of a jolt, check yourself for a pulse.  The moment we stop believing that our actions can make a difference in this world is the moment we thank our enemies for having dug the six-foot hole up ahead.  When we refuse to surrender and force our enemies to keep digging, then the only question that matters is this: who will get tired first?  

Even when you feel alone, there are people watching and wondering whether you will hold the line.  Some of those people are even carrying shovels.  But over time, your resilience changes minds.  Diggers throw down their tools to join sides with the people who refuse to go away.  It is an enduring certainty that all movements for great change begin with a smattering of strong-willed truth-tellers who seed the ground with inspiration before a harvest of raw courage sweeps the land.  Nobody can keep you from being that seed.  Perseverance is its own reward.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/john-brennan-enemy-of-the-people/

The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against former President Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.

John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.

From John Durham’s report:

“CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that ‘they found no conspiracy.’”

As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on air with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fake-history-and-redistributing-wealth/

Calls for reparations payments for the descendants of slaves and colonized peoples, the “latest obsession of the radical left,” as The Hill puts it, are currently growing, as is the tab. For example, San Francisco is proposing paying $5 million to each black resident, along with a guaranteed income of $97,000 for 250 years, and a home for a dollar. California is proposing cash payments of up to $1.2 million at a cost of $800 billion–three times the state’s annual budget. Not to be left out of the bidding, the Feds are asking for $14 trillion. But sponsor Rep. Cori Bush claims that is nowhere near the $97 trillion owed to blacks for slavery and Jim Crow.

This combination of obsession and grift also has infected England. On the eve of his coronation, Charles III was served a statement from the “commonwealth indigenous leaders.” They called on the new king “to acknowledge the horrific impacts on and legacy of genocide and colonization,” and to “redistribute the wealth that underpins the crown back to the peoples from whom it was stolen.” Given the extent and duration of the British Empire, that tab will no doubt be astronomical.

The rationale for this prohibitively expensive largess is a crude, Orwellian politicized history of the sort the left is famous for. The current proposals are unlikely to happen, but they are nonetheless racist and divisive, a testimony to how badly we are teaching history and civics––despite how dangerous to the public weal such neglect can be.

In practical terms, these schemes have numerous problems. How will eligibility be determined? Will state and federal governments investigate the genealogy of every American to determine if their ancestors were slave-owners? And what about the multiple millions of descendants of immigrants, including ethnic Africans, who came after the Civil War? Just in California there are more than 15 million ethnic Hispanics guiltless of American slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

Other questions abound. Will foreign-born blacks or their descendants be eligible? How about mixed-race Americans? Will the payments be means-tested? Or will the programs rely on “systemic racism” rhetorical sleight-of-hand to avoid these complications? In that view, given that all blacks have suffered,  and given that all so-called “white people,” no matter how poor, are born with “white privilege,” all people of pallor should pay. And since tax-revenues will be used to fund the payments, all ethnicities, with their own histories of oppression and injustice, will have to pay their fellow citizens who never suffered slavery.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/24/160-plus-retired-military-brass-urge-congress-to-root-out-dods-poisonous-diversity-and-equity-programs/

More than 160 retired generals and admirals recently signed a letter calling on Congress to remove so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from the Department of Defense and remove funding for such programs from the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“As our Nation faces looming threats from ‘foreign’ adversaries/enemies, our military is under assault from a culture war stemming from ‘domestic’ ideologically inspired political policies and practices. … Our military must be laser focused on one mission — readiness, undiminished by the culture war engulfing our country,” Flag Officers 4 America wrote in the letter addressed to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Armed Services Subcommittee Chairman Mike Rogers, and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert.

The signatories — which included former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Gen. James E. Livingston, and former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Gerald Boykin — expressed concern about how divisive and discriminatory DEI policies affect national security. So-called “equity,” they wrote, “sounds benign, but in practice it lowers standards. While equality provides equal opportunities, equity’s goal is equal outcomes.”

The officers argued that equal opportunity and meritocracy provide the greatest foundation for both equality and national defense, while the cultural Marxism promoted by DEI policies is a domestic threat to our national security.

“To achieve equal outcomes using identity group characteristics, standards must be lowered to accommodate the desired equity outcomes. Lower standards reduce performance where even slight differences in capability impact readiness and can determine war fighting mission success or failure,” they wrote. Furthermore, obsession with identity causes “friction and distrust in the ranks, damaging unit cohesion, teamwork and unity of effort, further degrading readiness.”

Instead of DEI, the signatories advocated for a return to longstanding meritocratic military recruitment standards, pointing to a long history of true inclusivity and diversity that accompanied those standards.

“Service Members (SMs) were judged not by the color of their skin but by their character, duty performance, and potential,” the officers explained. “Meritocracy, coupled with equal opportunity, created conditions for all to advance and excel, which stimulates healthy competition, thereby raising standards.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/24/many-of-our-elected-officials-are-unfit-to-serve-medical-problems-are-sometimes-the-cause/

Two U.S. senators recently became incapacitated – John Fetterman, D-Pa., with severe depression that required a months-long hospitalization, and whose outcome is uncertain; and Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., who had a shingles infection that developed into encephalitis, from which she has not fully recovered. (And at age 89, she is unlikely to.) Marked by inflammation and swelling of the brain, post-shingles encephalitis can leave patients with lasting memory or language problems, sleep disorders, bouts of confusion, mood disorders, headaches and difficulty walking.

Feinstein was absent from Washington and unable to fulfill her political responsibilities for months, leaving me and other Californians without half our Senate representation. She has returned to Washington but is confused and seemingly bewildered, even denying her protracted absence. The New York Times described Feinstein’s return this way on May 18: “The grim tableau of her re-emergence on Capitol Hill laid bare a bleak reality known to virtually everyone who has come into contact with her in recent days: She was far from ready to return to work when she did, and she is now struggling to function.”

This isn’t the first time that such situations have arisen, of course. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., was sufficiently forthright to reveal in 2007 that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration – an inexorably progressive, incurable disease characterized by the wasting away of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Because of the behavioral changes and dementia that accompany this condition, Domenici announced that he would not seek reelection the following year.

I had great sympathy for Domenici, but should the people of New Mexico have been represented for another year by a senator who admitted to suffering from progressive dementia? I believe he should have resigned at the time his illness was diagnosed.

https://dianebederman.com/is-america-a-christian-country/

Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green are two of many Conservatives who talk about America as a Christian country. Is that correct?

How will that sit with people like President Donald Trump? Will President Trump’s family feel welcome in that country? His daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Orthodox Jews. How could they promote a Christian country?  How could President Trump?

I fear if Conservatives start promoting America as a Christian country, they will be undermining the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They could divide Conservatives over religion and provide Democrats with a sledge hammer. Is that what the Republicans want?

Dividing America on religious lines is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent. They intentionally stated America would be a secular country. Period. They had experienced living in countries that had a stated religion and had gone to wars over religion.

Many of the earliest pilgrims who settled the “New England” of America in early 17th century were Puritan refugees escaping religious persecutions in Europe.

These Puritans viewed their emigration from England as a virtual re-enactment of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. To them, England was Egypt, the king was Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea, America was the Land of Israel, and the Indians were the ancient Canaanites. They were the new Israelites, entering into a new covenant with God in a new Promised Land.

Thanksgiving—first celebrated in 1621, a year after the Mayflower landed—was initially conceived as a day parallel to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; it was to be a day of fasting, introspection, prayer and gratitude.