RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-the-new-york-bridge-blockers

On the first commuting morning of the first full workweek of 2024, New York’s permanent “protesting” class demonstrated its tactical approach for the year: to make us miserable on our daily trips, even as the city struggles to attract pre-2020 commuting and tourism crowds. Under the rubric of “Shut it Down for Palestine,” a few hundred people on Monday managed, indeed, to shut down all three Lower Manhattan bridges to Brooklyn, as well as the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, just after the morning rush. They created gridlock that inconvenienced tens of thousands of drivers, bus riders, bike riders, and walkers. Following months of smaller-scale actions, it was agitators’ most disruptive action yet—and organizers will continue to escalate their behavior unless Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul make clear that blocking key transportation corridors is not “peaceful protest.”

Protests on all sides of any issue are a fact of urban life. But protesters are not free to obstruct movement; the First Amendment protects only speech and assembly, not unlawful obstruction of roads, transit, or sidewalks.  

Such illegal obstruction is the core tactic, though, of the post-2020 left-wing shut-it-all-down movement, and it started before George Floyd summer. On the last day of January 2020, a self-styled anarchist movement called “Decolonize this Place” swarmed Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. The few hundred masked agitators wanted to “disrupt” commuting until New York met their demands, including free transit and eliminating all policing in the subway system.  

They didn’t succeed in disrupting much of anything (though they did vandalize property), and the commuters who made their way through the mob might have seen the whole thing as a one-off aggravation. Even Occupy Wall Street, the precursor movement of nearly a decade before, hadn’t regularly interrupted New Yorkers on their daily journeys to work or to run errands. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20294/supreme-court-saving-democracy

Historians have an enormous advantage over the rest of us: they have the unique luxury of looking back through time and, with the power of hindsight, pinpointing the exact moment a new era began. Yet there are events that are so momentous, so crucial, and so obvious, that sometimes even those living in the moment can recognize their historic significance.

We are living through that moment.

Over the last several days, the turmoil surrounding the question of whether bureaucrats can unilaterally remove Donald Trump’s name from a presidential campaign ballot has only intensified. Colorado and Maine have already taken this action and other states are mulling the same.

As observed in a previous essay by this author, these actions attack the very fabric of our representative form of government. The idea that without so much as due process unelected persons in an individual state can remove a potential presidential candidate is the stuff of nightmares for a democracy.

Even leading Democrats have voiced opposition to this latest con by “ballot bandits.”

What this means, however, is that the future of our nation is now to the be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To their credit, they have recognized this threat and their need to consider the arguments as a matter of urgency for, make no mistake, this is an existential threat to our nation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dark-side-of-free-speech/

The ongoing protests against Israel––from its defense policies and warfighting tactics, to its very existence as a nation and a people––have featured levels of irrational hatred and despicable endorsements of genocidal terrorists. The U.S., of course, is also a target not just for being Israel’s enabler, but for alleged historical crimes like “settler colonialism,” racism, and genocide. These charges are morally idiotic, ethically incoherent, and historically challenged. And they serve and advance political agendas dangerous for our national interests and security.

That such mendacious protests are legal in most Western nations reflects one of the foundational principles of Western civilization: the freedom of ordinary citizens to criticize and challenge their own country’s policies and actions. But these recent protests highlight the dangers of that freedom: the nurturing and spreading of a national self-loathing that undermines the patriotism and loyalty any country needs to survive.

Of all the world’s great civilizations, none has been as critically self-conscious as the West.  Starting with the ancient Greeks, the West has been willing to question its own beliefs and institutions, make them objects of thought and criticism, search for their meaning and significance, and use this process to make innovative improvements. The Greeks, as the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt said, “seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity.”

Slavery, for example, has been a global evil since history began, and still persists in some regions of the world today. The Greeks’ critical examination of this practice––back then, no more questionable than the domestication of animals––on the one hand led to a justification for it, such as Aristotle’s infamous argument that those in bondage are “slaves by nature,” since they lack rational self-control and so can be justly controlled by another.

On the other hand, thinking critically about slavery also generated questions about the justice of it, as the early 4th century BC rhetorician Alcidamas did when he said, “The god gave freedom to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” It took two millennia, but this early argument that slavery is a consequence of force, and thus unnatural and unjust, bore fruit in the late 18th century when Christians started the West on the road to abolition.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/09/senator-floats-garlic-as-newest-national-security-threat/

The U.S. faces rapidly changing and increasingly precarious geopolitical conditions. Americans worry that communist China could become the new global polestar, that a revanchist Russia’s ambitions could stretch Ukraine into NATO, and that unrest in the Middle East could once again entangle the U.S. forces. Now, policymakers have identified a new looming threat: imported garlic.

Last week, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott asked the Commerce Department to investigate the national security risks posed by “Communist Chinese garlic.” Scott demands thoroughness; he wants an inquiry into “all grades of garlic, whole or separated into constituent cloves, whether or not peeled, chilled, fresh, frozen, provisionally preserved or packed in water or other neutral substance.” Should the department rule against China, the agency would likely impose new tariffs to protect “national security.”

Scott’s profoundly goofy request serves as a reminder that too many politicians, keen to serve some constituent industry, happily will invoke the specter of foreign threats to justify their preferred domestic economic interventions. Convincing bureaucrats to institute tariffs unilaterally avoids the procedural and political difficulties of passing legislation or otherwise operating the ordinary machinery of democratic policymaking.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/09/the-tax-and-command-party/

In the sphere of Democratic Party politics, taxes can never be high enough and government never big enough.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre drove home this sad fact with a sledge hammer last week when she said “Republican tax cuts are responsible for about 90%” of the federal debt that has reached a record $34 trillion, and is larger than the entire U.S. economy, which is not quite $27 trillion.

It is insane to believe this. But Democrats cling to the narrative with the same fanaticism that drove Karl Marx. Of the obvious connection, we will say no more – for the moment. 

No government has ever had a revenue problem. Deficits are the product overspending. Yes, it’s that simple. Families know this. Businesses know this. Yet somehow policymakers – from both parties, unfortunately – refuse to operate under this fundamental truth. Freely and irresponsibly spending other people’s money is deeply ingrained within them.

This is especially true in Washington, where spending has with rare exception exceeded revenues for more than a half century. From 1968 to 2019, federal outlays averaged 20.3% of GDP. Projections indicate that by 2050, it will surpass 30% of GDP.

As the government grows, the private sector must shrink, at least in proportion to the entire economy. Where does it end? Do the Democrats have a point at which they say “enough”? Some might. But the trajectory of the party is a clear indication that most prefer a country in which government, not the private sector, dominates economic and social life.