RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/is-the-era-of-progressive-prosecutors-ending

We all know that the presidential election is looming, but for a few big cities, a crucial down-ballot vote—for the office of chief prosecutor—could have a major effect on the day-to-day safety of their citizens.

In Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, voters will decide whether to oust radical prosecutor George Gascón. Gascón barely made it through his first term, surviving two recall efforts based on technicalities. Soaring crime rates and a general sense of disorder have led even progressive Angelenos to say that enough is enough.

Gascón is opposed by Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who has promised to pursue policies that treat those who commit crimes as criminals. In current polling, Gascón trails Hochman by 24 points. In a last-minute Hail Mary, Gascón has decided to support re-sentencing and clemency for the notorious Menendez brothers, convicted of the brutal murders of their parents, despite their claims having been repeatedly rejected by the courts. Election Day will decide whether Los Angeles is ready to start rebuilding.

Meantime, heading north in California, another critical chief prosecutor is on the ballot: Pamela Price in Oakland. Price, along with Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao, is facing a recall election after just two years in office. Many Oakland voters have expressed the same buyers’ remorse as their neighbors across the bay in San Francisco, who recalled progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin after a few years in office, amid spiraling crime and disorder.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

While Kamala Harris began her campaign with a promise of joy, it soon deteriorated into character smears against her opponent, with Ms. Harris calling him “fascist” and a “Hitler,” and with President Biden referring to Mr. Trump’s supporters as “garbage.” What makes the “fascist” label ironic is that, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in last Thursday’s issue of American Greatness, “…he [Trump] has been the target of fascists machinations from her own party and supporters for nearly a decade.”

Mr. Trump has always appeared devoid of humor, except when polls swing his way. Writing in the current UK issue of The Spectator, Kate Andrews noted “…in the past few weeks, something has restored Trump’s humor.” As the audience left a recent rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she quoted a man speaking to his family: “That was better than Netflix.”  Most of us smiled when Mr. Trump, wearing an orange reflector vest (and in response to Mr. Biden’s remark), jumped into a garbage truck in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump does have a habit of calling his opponents names that would make Gordon Gekko blush. Amidst this war of words, America seems an unhappy place. Last Thursday, The Washington Post editorialized: “…in an increasingly angry nation…incidents of road rage escalate across the country.”  As in 1888 Mudville, there is little joy in the U.S. today.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/04/reflections-on-an-american-saga/

Regardless of whatever happens on Tuesday, the end of the 2024 election will have a bittersweet feel to it, for it will be the final chapter of Donald J. Trump’s story. Whether it is the end of the final chapter or just the beginning is up to us to decide.

But perhaps Trump can already claim victory, no matter who is ultimately declared the winner at the end of it all. And his would be a far greater victory than any one election result.

All Good Things

The future of the nation depends on the decision that will be made shortly. But, win or lose, it will not be the end of the United States of America. Not by a long shot. America is resilient, and no one personifies that titanic endurance like Donald Trump.

They hit him with a fake “Russian collusion” investigation, two impeachments, a Chinese virus, race riots, a stolen election, an FBI raid, dozens of bogus charges, a mugshot, a conviction in a kangaroo court, and multiple assassination attempts. But through it all, when there was doubt, he always ate it up and spit it back out. With nerves of steel and a heart of gold, he walked right through the fire every single time, refusing to quit until the race was finally over.

That is exactly why here, in the end, it is rather difficult to come to terms with the idea that President Trump’s political journey is entering its conclusion. He himself has said as much, admitting that he will not run for a fourth time in 2028 if this election is also stolen from him.

And, despite the left’s endless screeching about him being a “dictator in waiting” who may extend his time in office, it is clear to those with an IQ higher than room temperature that he will leave office in 2029, as he should, if he wins this election. In the end, the one and only thing that can bring Trump’s political journey to an end is the one thing he has always loved and respected the most: the will of the American people.

And so, win or lose, this will be the final election with Donald Trump’s name on the ballot.

This fact was not lost on me as I filled out my absentee ballot for the general election in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was the sixth time overall that I had filled in the bubble next to his name, the culmination of his historic three consecutive successful runs for the Republican nomination. I found myself hesitating to fill out the ballot, only because I wanted to savor the act one final time.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/04/from-clingers-to-garbage-why-the-16-years-of-vilification/

Who actually are the “garbage” people?

Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?”

Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?”

Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?”

Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?”

Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly?

Who are these people that leftwing politicians have so vehemently derided—and why?

They include Trump supporters, of course, or what Biden also dubbed “ultra-MAGAs” and Tim Walz called “fascists,” now without the prior qualifying prefix “semi.”

In general, these adjectives of disdain denote about half the country according to the results of what will soon be the last three presidential elections.

This half is more rural than urban, characterized by larger than smaller families, more high-schooled diplomaed than college degreed, and more conventional and traditional than vanguard and trend-setting.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fascists-all-the-way-down/

In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”

Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

As the word’s use by progressives and leftists––at this point synonyms for “Democrats”––have shown for decades, their understanding of conservatism’s principles and tenets is limited to the infinite regression of “fascists all the way down.” In this election season, they are binging 24/7 on “fascists” with plenty of “Hitlers” thrown in to ratchet up the evil quotient with evocations of genocide and the horrors of the death camps.

The problem is not just the blatant abuse of history, truth, and language, which since ancient Athens has been a habit typical of representative governments that give widely diverse citizens freedom of speech. The more pertinent and dangerous point about this misuse of “fascist” as a political smear is that it obscures how much American progressivism has in common with historical fascism––an oversight made worse by the left’s assumption that conservativism and capitalism are ideologically and organically fascist, and thus profoundly more unjust and dangerous than socialism and other forms of statism.

In reality, as Jonah Goldberg explained in his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, not the right––an “inconvenient truth,” Goldberg writes, “if ever there was one.”