RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/democrats_have_completely_abandoned_civility.html

On July 20, Nancy Pelosi said that if President Trump refuses to accept the results of the November election, he will have to be “fumigated” out of the White House.  Fumigation is a technique used against insects, and the idea that human beings are insects has a long history in totalitarian discourse.  Hitler described Jews as “vermin” and “parasites,” a form of dehumanization that is always just one step away from physical violence.  Speaker Pelosi should apologize immediately, and profusely, for her use of this inappropriate rhetoric.

Most thoughtful persons would agree that labeling another an “insect” is uncivil.  A cultured individual who practices civility is tolerant of the opinions and beliefs of others, and indeed, toleration is the best measure of civility.  One may be a Catholic, but he practices tolerance toward other Christian and non-Christian forms of belief, even including atheism and agnosticism.  He may be a liberal, but he values the opinions of conservatives and treats conservatives with respect.

By this measure, Joe Biden and the radicals who now support him have not been civil.  Biden now expresses contempt for conservative policies before even considering their potential value.  So it was with President Trump’s pledge to buy American-made goods.  That pledge of “America First” drew harsh criticism from Biden and his party — until Biden stole the idea and made it part of his own platform.  Biden could not bring himself to admit that Trump was right.  That sort of contempt for another is the essence of incivility. 

Like most liberals, Biden’s contempt is all-encompassing.  In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., ultimately decided in Hobby Lobby’s favor by the Supreme Court, Biden sided with those who would force persons of traditional Christian faith to pay for employees’ contraceptives.  Indeed, it was Biden’s Affordable Care Act that forced Hobby Lobby to provide all twenty FDA-approved contraceptives to employees.  The Obama administration was intolerant of traditionalists when it wrote the contraceptive mandate into the Affordable Care Act, and Biden would only double down on this intolerance if he sought to restore the mandate to his “expanded” version of Obamacare.

Hobby Lobby was not an isolated case of liberal intolerance.  In every free speech case that arose during the Obama years, Biden seemed more than willing to force his opinions on others.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/07/24/the-frankfurt-school-and-excellent-foolishness-how-the-left-infects-impressionable-minds-n696846

It has long struck me how the Frankfurt School, a collection of Leftist émigrés from Nazi Germany, could have been so successful in dominating the curriculum of the American university and wielding so massive an influence over following generations of students. Its major figures, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, were the main authors of the political revolution of the 1960s which gradually filtered into the culture to produce the revisionist “narrative” and physical violence we observe all around us today.

The most publically significant spokesperson was Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization and his influential, totalitarian-inspired essay “Repressive Tolerance” planted the seeds of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia and, ultimately, in the marl of the cultural and institutional life. Marcuse argued in the essay that we must be “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By “status quo,” he meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility, and limited government, which he thought were responsible for deep-rooted social injustice. The narrative he developed was irresistible to his legion of acolytes.

The Frankfurters were the red brigades of the university Left, striving to fill their students’ minds with the doctrine of human and social perfectibility according to the egalitarian principles of their Marxist forbears, in particular the theories and ruminations of the Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. The Woke generation now rioting in the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other cities are their unwitting progeny, the shock troops of Antifa and BLM who never read Marcuse, let alone Horkheimer, Adorno, Gramsci or Lukács—and surely would be incapable of doing so with any comprehension. They have succumbed to a political virus of which they are unaware, fallen prey to a toxic narrative developed by the luminaries of the intellectual Left. This is what I would dub trickle-down intellectonomics, how complex thought (however specious) gradually leaks away into howls, bellows, and yawps.

There is no doubt that the crucial figures of the “Western Marxist” movement were brilliant men and erudite scholars, eloquent to a fault. They were right about some things, in particular about the rise of anti-Semitism as a function of a world sinking into barbarism. But how could they have been so wrong about America, working to transform the American Dream into the American Nightmare?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/protests-chicago-portland-andrew-mccarthy

Demagogues aligning themselves with subversives against federal agents are wrong

“Unidentified stormtroopers” is what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the law enforcement agents of the Department of Homeland Security struggling to protect the federal courthouse that Portland, Ore., rioters have been firebombing.

“The president’s personal militia,” chimed in Tom Ridge, the nation’s first Homeland Security secretary.

It’s shameful.

Never is it more critical for the nation’s senior officials and elder statesmen to present a united American front than in times of insurrection. No matter how we may feel about the underlying political grievances, when peaceful protest descends into violent subversion, or — more accurately — when essentially violent subversion is allowed to masquerade as peaceful protest, there needs to be ringing condemnation and support for law enforcement.

Yet, Democrats and Trump-abhorring Republicans cannot get past their petty political score-settling, even for the purpose of supporting law enforcement against violent anti-American radicals.

This is not one of those times for “But Trump …” bleating. Yes, the president is abrasive and prone to say inexcusable things. On this one, though, there is only one right and one wrong side. The demagogues aligning themselves with subversives against federal agents are wrong. Say what you will about the president, he’s made it very clear he’s with our agents.

Pelosi is a professional political partisan, among the most powerful members of a party that, like Middle Eastern governments, thinks it can make common cause with violent radicals, even use them as political attack dogs, and not get bitten in the end. Sadly, then, her slander against law enforcement comes as no surprise.

Ridge’s remarks, on the other hand, are worth pausing over. First, there was the revisionist history: DHS, he says, “was established to protect America from the ever-present threat of global terrorism.”

https://www.city-journal.org/science-of-covid-19-policy-choices

When doctors meet a patient for a new complaint, we make a list of different possible explanations for the problem—a differential diagnosis—and try to determine the correct diagnosis, while starting treatment for the most likely one. After this initial assessment, as test and imaging results come in, we may alter the differential diagnosis and treatments.

Public-health officials dealing with a new pathogen, like the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, go through a similar process. They must recommend policies with incomplete information and adjust them over time. But unlike physicians, they do so in public, and sometimes under intense scrutiny.

Dr. Anthony Fauci—and this is not meant as criticism—has epitomized the public-health diagnostic process with multiple, incorrect, early pronouncements: In January and February, he downplayed the risk of person-to-person spread; he expressed doubt that asymptomatic people could transmit the virus; in late February, he reassured the public that, “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis”; and in March, like many other public-health officials here and abroad, he said that, outside of health-care personnel, ordinary people should not wear masks. In fact, both Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams suggested that mask-wearing could increase a person’s risk of being infected. All these assertions proved wrong.

We know a lot more about the virus—how it’s transmitted and how to treat it—than we did a few months ago. For instance, the coronavirus can spread person-to-person from both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Dr. Fauci now espouses the opposite of each of his earlier statements, but there is nothing wrong with that. As economist John Maynard Keynes purportedly said, “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?”