RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/14/a-new-offensive-trump-the-gop-and-the-battle-for-americas-future/

Having just spent a week padding about battle sites around Verdun and the Somme,  I could not help but register the historical vibration of certain dates. Was it entirely coincidental that on July 18, 1918, Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, launched a major counteroffensive against the Germans in the Second Battle of the Marne? That operation  was the beginning of the end for the Boche.  They sued for peace in November after American General John Pershing crushed the German forces near Montfaucon, northwest of Verdun.

This Thursday, July 18, 2024, Donald Trump will deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. I like to think that Trump’s address will mark the beginning of a potent counteroffensive against the soul-blighting, woke forces of the Democratic juggernaut.

Like the German army in the summer of 1918, the Democrats are in rabid disarray.  On paper, they still command impressive force.  They continue to jail their political  opponents and shower Donald Trump with potentially lethal legal shrapnel. [UPDATE: I wrote this column  before the assassination attempt on Donald  Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania yesterday.  I will have more to say about that in due course.]

But though their guns may continue their periodic eructations, morale among the troops teeters on despair. Their leaders are panicking.

Of the Kaiser, Winston Churchill once remarked that “in every crisis he crumbled.  In defeat, he fled; in revolution, he abdicated; in exile, he remarried.” What would Churchill say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Addressing NATO a few days ago, the leader of the free world introduced the President of Ukraine as “President Putin.” Asked whether he really thought Kamala Harris was up to the top job, Biden said, “I would not have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I did not think she is qualified to be president. Let’s start there.”

Shall we start there? Harris, the half-Indian, half-Jamaican scion of slave owners,  may be a certified “person of color.” But she is also living proof that senility is not the only form of cognitive-rhetorical incapacity.

Like the Germans in the summer of 1918, the Democrats and their media poodles are full of sound and fury.  The New York Times, for example, is regularly on the battlements, delivering anguished rhetorical air-raid sirens. They understand that “Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished.” Hence, the Times, along with other besieged media battalions, are engaged in a desperate pantomime to diffuse the biggest threat to their franchise. Donald Trump is “unfit to lead,” they skirl; Republicans will rue the day Trump is reelected, they insist. He’s a dictator in waiting, a bully, and a man of bad character who tramples upon the rule of law.

This signal-jamming wall of static is impervious to fact—including the fact that almost every item of the Democrats’ bill of indictment is a morsel in the giant feast of projection that Trump’s opponents have laid on.

https://victorhanson.com/our-brezhnev-our-pravda-our-soviet-union/

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication.

By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure.

Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous health and constant hands-on involvement.

“Journalists” sent out false communiques. They spun narratives that Brezhnev was robust, hale, and working long hours on behalf of the Russian people. Any dissenting journalists who sought to report the true, sad state of affairs were in danger of losing their jobs, freedom—or even their lives.

Instead, the “reporters” of Pravda (“Truth”), the official print megaphone of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote lies about Brezhnev’s busy workdays. Pravda’s handlers spun fables about the respect (and fear) the rest of the world held for such a dynamic leader—even as Brezhnev became an ill virtual recluse.

The cynical Russian people shrugged because they had long been accustomed to their lying media and the falsehoods they peddled. And besides, Brezhnev was a doctrinaire Stalinist communist. So his job was not to rock the boat or upset the Russian communist hierarchy.

Instead, he reigned over the penultimate Soviet “era of stagnation,” while an ossified communism increasingly destroyed all incentives and hope, leaving the Russian people poor, cynical, and helpless.

Something similar has happened to a calcified America under President Joe Biden. Like the late-stage Leonid Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only. He has outsourced his administration to a vestigial hard-left apparat from the Obama years.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/sociologys-descent-into-woke-satire/

Most casual observers, especially those with even slight conservative leanings, would agree that sociology is obviously left-wing. But this wasn’t always the case. When I began my sociology graduate work in the early nineties, it was the classical spirit of the discipline that drove me. There was then enough of the residue of what the discipline had been at its origins to enable idealistic souls like myself to imagine that sociology was still about uncovering the objective realities of social life, rather than simply producing a radical mythology that denounced all that existed and preached the necessity of total revolution.

Radical Marxist approaches were certainly there from the beginning. But many of these had at least the patina of intellectual seriousness and required substantive efforts to challenge and dismantle. However much one disagreed with Marx, for example, one could not reasonably call him a fool and a charlatan, at least if one had read him. He was wrong, but not obviously ignorant of basic things and oblivious to the requirements of argument and evidence.

Today’s sociology is so patently devoid of any intellectual rigor that most of it evokes only contemptuous laughter. The arguments advanced, the “evidence” mustered to support its partisan claims, are so weak that it is genuinely amazing to realize that the people making these cases have spent many years in educational institutions and yet have come away from all that with either no understanding of or an utter contempt for careful and rigorous argument.

Sociology Advertises Its Product

For example, the American Sociological Association (ASA) offers a series of video shorts titled “Sociological Insights.” These clips feature sociologists presenting their research in brief, visually engaging morsels. They are intended to provide an introduction to sociological reasoning and analysis. But the viewer who is not already converted to the Woke cult to which the ASA gives its allegiance can be forgiven for thinking, on watching a selection of the videos, that they were made by an enemy of sociology, as a wickedly humorous satire of the discipline.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-says-anti-israel-student-protesters-are-showing-exactly-what-the-human-emotion-should-be/

There have been many hints at the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris is more hostile to Israel than President Biden. As Democrats take a closer look at her as the most likely replacement should Biden drop out of the race, her views on Middle East policy will undergo closer scrutiny. Now, in an interview with Joan Walsh in the The Nation, Harris makes clear that she sympathizes with the anti-Israel protesters on college campuses — even though she doesn’t agree with everything they said.

Here is the part of the interview that gets to her views on Israel’s war against Hamas:

“Listen, I strongly believe that our ability to evaluate a situation is connected to understanding the details of that situation. Not speaking of myself versus the president, not at all. From the beginning, I asked questions. OK, the trucks are taking flour into Gaza. But here’s the thing, Joan: I like to cook. So I said to my team: You can’t make shit with flour if you don’t have clean water. So what’s going on with that? I ask questions like, What are people actually eating right now? I’m hearing stories about their eating animal feed, grass … so that’s how I think about it.

“Similarly, I was asking early on, what are women in Gaza doing about sanitary hygiene. Do they have pads? And these are the issues that made people feel uncomfortable, especially sanitary pads.”

The young people who have mobilized against the destruction of Gaza are unlikely to be mollified by these answers. What does she say to them?

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

Harris is careful to provide herself an escape hatch — to say she doesn’t fully endorse everything the protesters say — but it’s clear that in her mind, she feels that she has to say something nice about the antisemitic protests because ultimately she is trying to win over the pro-Hamas contingent of the party