RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://victorhanson.com/civilization-versus-the-new-nihilists/

Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.

If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.

Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.

By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.

Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?

As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, eight-million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration.

They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.

The same nihilism applies to crime.

In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.

Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20219/border-crisis-new-york

You could not blame Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams, or anyone else, if — as they remember the economic boom and global calm of the pre-Covid America of President Donald Trump — they were to cast their secret ballot in November for more of the “Trump Boom.”

US President Joe Biden’s disastrous Open Border policy has turned “sanctuary cities” into unrecognizable migrant camps, and New York City is at ground zero of this crisis. More than 110,000 migrants have been left off on Manhattan streets, more than twice as many as cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

Remember when self-proclaimed “Sanctuary Martha’s Vineyard” would not accept even 50?

Not surprisingly, the New York mayor’s poll numbers have plunged as New Yorkers of all stripes looked at what the city has become, reportedly finding his management of the issue pathetic. The problem is twofold. It was not Adams who created the problem, and when he looked to Washington for financial help, he came away with the warning, “the cavalry isn’t coming.”

The impact on New York City from the “Biden border crisis” is, on one hand, incalculable regarding the destruction of its quality of life. On the other hand, you can calculate down to the dollar what it is costing New York. Adams has told every city department commissioner that there will be the need for $4 billion in budget cuts over the next 18 months to close an even larger $7.1 billion gap expected in 2024. Every agency, from the police department to the parks, will be impacted. These cuts harm the very fabric of the city’s ability to function, yet the Biden administration does not seem to have any intention of providing economic aid for a crisis of its making.

Although we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Virtually every one of us is the descendant of immigrants who risked everything to come to this country. Most came with a handful of currency and the name of some distant relative who would vouch for them. We recognize the enormous power that came from the collective energies of so many wishing to call themselves Americans, but that did not come about from an “open border” policy that now leaves our nation’s cities picking up the tab and, worse, that potentially leaves the country open to terrorism from migrants who are not able to be checked or from the 1.6 million “gotaways” — that we know about. It took only 19 terrorists on 9/11 to bring down the World Trade Center, in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20216/woke-cowardice-university-presidents

As Ecclesiastes observed “to everything there is a season”. This seems to be the season for woke cowardice

[These administrators] are also insensitive to civil liberties and the rights of those with whom they disagree.

It creates divisiveness on campuses that makes Jewish students and faculty fearful for their safety when their university president seems unwilling to apply the same standard to those who advocate genocide against Jews as they surely would against anyone who advocated genocide against Blacks or the raping of women or the shooting of gay and transgender people.

What these universities need now are principled advocates of a single standard, rather than leaders who base their decisions on outside pressures and the need to pander to extremist students, faculty and administrators.

One thing is clear: [university presidents] should be selected on the basis of relevant, individual meritocratic criteria— not the cookie cutter criteria of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies.

The forced resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a good first step in dealing with a far more pervasive problem in higher education.

The three university presidents who disgraced themselves and their universities by their abysmal testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce represent a far larger concern.

In recent years, many universities have selected as their presidents woke, progressive cowards who pander to the most extreme and most vocal left-wing students and professors. They are the wrong people, at the wrong time, to be leading American educational institutions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/13/where-is-our-javier-milei/

The new Argentinian president is a radical, a far-right outsider and a right-wing reactionary, if the press is to be believed. But he’s not at all the demon that the mental-case media claims he is. Javier Milei is the type of elected official – note that we didn’t say “politician” – that this country needs. In fact, every nation on the planet could use a Javier Milei.

“No country declined as rapidly or as severely as Argentina,” Investopedia said a year ago in a post explaining the country’s relationship with socialism. “In 1989 the average inflation rate in Argentina approached 5,000%, and in March 1990 it peaked at over 20,000%.” 

Also mentioned were the country’s sovereign debt default, as well as its “political corruption and an irresponsible monetary policy.” Our friends at the Committee to Unleash prosperity tells us that 45% of Argentina’s “46 million people are in poverty and the economy is on the edge of hyperinflation” and that “over the past 50 years government spending as a share of the economy has almost doubled.”

All of these problems in what was once one of the 10 richest countries on Earth, overflowing with natural resources, have been caused not by not enough government intervention into the economy and daily lives but by too much.

Will the U.S. first have to sink to the depths of Argentina before we have a free-market champion step in? We’re not there yet, but three years of economic “stewardship” under the Biden White House has taken us dangerously close to a wreck.

For good reason “voters are “feeling horrible” about the economy under Biden. According to Fortune, a “big part” of the stock market is “unconvinced economy is going anywhere” because there is “weakness underneath the hood.” In its most recent report, the Conference Board said the leading economic indicators declined “again in October.” It forecasts “that real GDP will expand by just 0.8 percent in 2024.” The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank expects “slower GDP growth” in 2024, and noted that “inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target” even as it grip “appears to be breaking.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/12/11/protestors-who-want-to-see-hamas-survive-took-over-another-congressional-building-n2632256

A group of “pro-Palestine” protestors — read: those who are “demanding” a ceasefire that would benefit Hamas and give the Iran-backed terrorists a chance at surviving to launch more October 7-level attacks on innocent Israelis — occupied the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building just steps from the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning. Their tantrum caused authorities to close the building to the public, allowing only senators and staff to enter the building. 

Demonstrators carried banners that claimed “AID TO ISRAEL = BOMBING PALESTINIANS,” a creative interpretation of reality that ignores the fact that Hamas terrorists are using Gazans as human shields and the death tolls being parroted by these demonstrators are known to be inaccurate coming directly from the Hamas terrorist-run government in the Gaza Strip.

Another fact these agitators taking over a Senate office building seemingly want to ignore: it was Hamas that violated the first cessation in fighting during which some Israeli hostages were released. That is — not that the terrorists needed to make their aims any clearer — Hamas preferred to try killing more Israelis than to lay down their arms to end the IDF’s justified strikes on terrorists, their infrastructure, and their weapons hidden by Hamas in hospitals, schools, mosques, and other civilian areas. What’s more, Hamas had a ceasefire on October 6, then launched their brutal massacre that killed more Jews in any single day since the Holocaust. Hamas again had a ceasefire for several days in late November, then chose to violate its terms and launch more attacks on innocent Israelis. Neither time was Israel to blame for setting off the war.

In addition to making noise and occupying the atrium of the Hart building, at least one demonstrator climbed a statue to continue screaming demands before surrendering his position to be arrested by Capitol Police along with his fellow agitators.