RUTHFULLY YOURS

A PBS documentary provides fashionable rationalizations for the looting that erupted during the 1977 New York City blackout.

In a documentary brimming with sociopolitical messaging, this American Experience film goes back to the hot July night of 1977 that saw New York City suddenly go dark, then erupt in a widespread orgy of violence, looting and arson—the most extensive in East Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The film diligently traces the cause of the blackout—a lightning strike in Westchester County, and a resulting chain reaction that ended with total power loss for almost all all of New York City. But it’s clear virtually from the outset of “Blackout” that the power that concerns the filmmakers doesn’t have much to do with electricity.

We had vowed not to write about Donald Trump, but Democrats and the media are so eager to use the political apprentice to define conservatism that we can’t avoid it. He won’t win a GOP caucus or primary, but he is notable as a Democratic weapon against Republicans.

The latest to wield the Sword of Donaldese is Hillary Clinton, who broke her media silence this week to denounce the Clinton Foundation contributor. “I’m very disappointed in those comments” about Mexicans, she said—then the quick political pivot—“and I feel very bad and very disappointed with him and with the Republican Party for not responding immediately and saying, enough, stop it.”

Winston Churchill – May 13, 1940

“We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Obama:July 7, 2015 : “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. “….”Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

Obama wants to fight ISIS in a battle of wits.

On the anniversary of the Battle of Heliopolis, Barack Hussein Obama stopped by the Pentagon to tell everyone there that their big guns couldn’t beat ISIS because “Ideologies are not defeated with guns”.

This would be news to the American GIs that beat Nazism, not with hashtags, but with bullets. WW2 propaganda, much of it of a crude nature that would make a modern sophisticated progressive turn up his nose, helped boost morale, but it was the firepower that took down Adolf’s armies.

After consulting with military leaders at the Pentagon this afternoon President Obama held a press conference on the growing threat of ISIS. President Obama declared the United States “will never be at war with Islam.” Obama also said, “ideologies are not defeated with guns but better ideas.”
— RealClearPolitics, July 7, 2015

On First anniversary of the Defeat of Hitler, a General Recalls the Strategy That Beat Hitler
— New York Times, July 11, 2016

General Prancible pauses to put on his spectacles, reinforcing the donnish, scholarly air that characterized much of the World War II top brass. He opens a book and draws a wizened finger down the page, stopping at an entry, and smiles as though recalling an old friend, or first love.

A new poll’s disturbing findings on the growing antipathy toward Israel

First, the good news. Recent polling conducted in February by Gallup suggests that Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and by wide margins. Seventy percent of Americans rate Israel very or mostly favorably. By contrast, only 17% of Americans rate Palestinians favorably. When asked if they sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians, 62% of the respondents said they sympathize with Israel while only 16% said they sympathized with the Palestinians. The remainder sympathized with neither side or had no opinion on the matter

When broken down along party allegiance however, the disparity between Republican and Democratic Party members becomes more pronounced. An astounding 83% of those who sympathized more with Israel were Republicans, 59% were Independents and only 48% were Democrats.

The “sanctuary city” movement that gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans is the product of decades of concerted collusion by radical groups like the ACLU to get cities to pledge to violate laws that protect U.S. national security.

Cheered on by the Left, sanctuary cities frustrate immigration enforcement efforts and shield illegal aliens from federal officials as a matter of policy.

The Obama administration is fine with that. President Obama has made America a sanctuary country, rolling out the red carpet for illegal aliens, especially those from Mexico, to come to the U.S. and depress labor markets while they suck the nation’s welfare state dry.

Stanley Kurtz predicted all this in his book which I reviewed in 2012:

Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (Interview with Stanley Kurtz) by Ruth King
Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/spreading-the-wealth-how-obama-is-robbing-the-suburbs-to-pay-for-the-cities-interview-with-stanley-kurtz#ixzz3fOA1jGBO

Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article preemptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013.

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

Global warming hysterics wonder why so many people don’t take them–or their cause–all that seriously.

Case in point, an unintentionally hilarious column in The Guardian shouting that we are all going to die from global warming. From, “It’s Too Late to Save Our World,” by Stewart Lee:

Everything will die soon, except for cockroaches, and Glastonbury favourite the Fall, who will survive even a nuclear holocaust, though they will still refuse to play their 80s chart hits.

Everything? Really? Yes.

The destruction of all life on Earth is inevitable if fossil fuel use continues unabated.

Quite a large number seem to learn little of any lasting value, according to Arum and Roksa in Academically Adrift. That’s bad enough, but some students appear to be absorbing some truly cancerous ideas on campus. They’re learning how to use raucous protest and administrative procedures to harass and silence anyone who dares to disagree with their preconceived ideas. What they seem to expect college to do is to reinforce their beliefs rather than challenge them.

That is the argument FIRE president Greg Lukianoff makes in his chapter in a splendid new book The State of the American Mind, edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I write about this growing problem.