RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-chaz

The new state of CHAZ has evolved. Over the past week, following Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s decision to abandon the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct Building, left-wing protesters have transformed the surrounding neighborhood into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), hoping to create a new political authority based on social-justice principles. On its first night, the new micro-state was led by the armed paramilitaries of Antifa and the John Brown Gun Club, but after preventing the return of police and securing defined borders, the CHAZ has sought to implement civilian rule.

Almost immediately, activists established a social structure based on a “reverse hierarchy of oppression”: Native American, black, and trans women are the highest authority; diversity determines individual social status; and whites are called upon to perform rituals of atonement. Through a series of speeches and community gatherings, activists have sought to implement the social theory of “decolonization,” which, in the words of Black Lives Matter activist Nikkita Oliver, means overthrowing capitalism, eliminating the structures of “patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism,” and returning the land of the autonomous zone to displaced Native American tribes.

In practice, the CHAZ leadership has taken small steps toward reversing the power structure and redistributing resources. Black and Native American speakers have been “centered” in leadership roles in all community meetings, with white audience members asked to “move past guilt or fragility” and “commit to long-term action and accountability.” At one evening event, an indigenous-rights activist with a purple bandana wrapped around his face announced a campaign for immediate small-scale reparations: “I want you to give $10 to one African-American person from this autonomous zone,” he said to a large crowd gathered on a baseball field. “White people, I see you. I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African-American person and you give them $10.”

https://spectator.org/coronavirus-lockdown-lies-confederate-statues-alex-berenson-antifa/

I broke my ankle early in the coronavirus lockdown. So at least I’m locked down by something real; otherwise I think I’d go mad.

I am astonished at how my fellow Americans — a good many of them, anyway — have accepted that they have no unalienable rights, that their lives and liberty depend entirely on the whims of governors and mayors.

I am astonished that so many of our leaders — in government, in corporate America, in our churches — believe that riots in the streets should be met with kneeling and abasement and apologies.

I am less astonished that so few of our leaders will defend Confederate memorials; somehow it has become nearly impossible to articulate a defense of American history that was once common currency, that celebrated the Union’s victory in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery while appreciating the Confederacy’s heroes as America’s heroes. As Theodore Roosevelt put it, America had the “proud right to claim as its own the glory won alike by those who wore the blue and by those who wore the gray, by those who followed Grant and by those who followed Lee; for both fought with equal bravery and with equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was given to him to see the light.” Such magnanimity is anathema now.

For too long we have tolerated — some of us out of good manners, some thinking it unimportant, some effectively co-opted by the Left, and some just plain cowards — lies about American history. In the process, we have forfeited our past. The argument that America is morally indefensible has pretty much won the day. Even those who can’t possibly believe it are too cowed to resist it.

But the lies we have to swallow go far beyond American history.