RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/458175-what-the-grievance-brigade-misunderstands-about-america

The ongoing crusade against America’s civic rituals and founding values picked up pace this summer.

The city council of St. Louis Park, Minn., stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings, lest immigrants feel “uncomfortable.” Nike junked a commemorative Fourth of July shoe with an embroidered Revolutionary War flag on its heel because the flag could “offend and detract” from the national holiday. The Charlottesville, Va., city council scrapped the city holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. The San Francisco School Board voted to cover up a mural of George Washington. Colorado State University recommended against using “America” or “American” to refer to the United States and its citizens since those words “erase” other cultures in the Western hemisphere.

Previously, monuments to American history have been shrouded, vandalized and removed; patriotic ceremonies have been cancelled or renamed. A former San Francisco school board president, now a city supervisor, encouraged schools honoring Washington, James Monroe, Jefferson, and Francis Scott Key to rechristen themselves, because those historical figures “are not relevant or meaningful or inspire pride.” A statue of Abraham Lincoln at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been targeted repeatedly for removal because, as one protester from an indigenous student group explained: “Let’s be real. He owned slaves . . .and ordered the execution of Native men.” 

These erasures are done in the name of fighting patriarchy, racism, genocide and colonialism. At the next outbreak of iconoclastic zeal, two questions should be posed to the purifiers:

Compared to what? 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/20/trump-is-fighting-the-battles-no-one-was-willing-to-fight/

President Trump is broadening the effect of the presidency by taking on issues no previous leader was willing to address. First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials. 

Well, it’s about time! 

It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.  

Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274679/when-white-became-ideology-and-not-human-reality-bruce-thornton

Recently, terminal Trumpophobe Max Boot went after chronic Trumpophobe National Review for not being extreme enough in their denunciation of “white grievance politics” and “whining” whites, who “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree,” and expose their belief “that white supremacy is the natural order of things.” Boot counsels “clueless white people” to “get a grip” and tone down the “sense of outrage that white people feel when they fear losing their privileged position to people of color.”

John Nolte on Brietbart humorously dissects Boot’s racialist drivel and the NeverTrump civil war, and John Hirschauer ably defends NRO’s real point. What I find interesting 50 years after the Civil Rights legislation is the continuing use of empty terms like “white.” Such racial categories are left-overs from early 20th century “scientific racism,” which dressed up irrational and self-serving bigotry in the technical terminology and quantitative procedures of real science. Today, they are the instruments of the progressive project of dismantling the Constitutional order at the expense of freedom.

Back in the heyday of “scientific racism,” the category “white” was an incoherent amalgam of superficial physical characteristics like skull shape and skin-color, with subjectively defined inherited “traits”––including vague qualities like “gumption” or “stick-to-it-ive-ness”––  that in fact reflected cultural differences, different social mores, affluence, and geographic diversity. Soon “white” denoted the Anglo-Norman, Nordic, and Germanic peoples, often compressed into WASPs, who comprised America’s socio-economic, political, and educational elite. That same demographic provided the intellectual and political advocates of “scientific racism” and the eugenics movement, which sought to limit immigrants from southern Italy, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, who by the Darwinian laws of nature were incapable of functioning in a politically free, economically advanced society.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/baby-killers

“Thou shalt not kill.” Exodus 20:13

”…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live:”Deuteronomy 30:19

Remember good ole boy Johnny Edwards—actually North Carolina Democrat Senator John Edwards (1998-2012), VP candidate in 2004, and presidential candidate in 2008? Edwards is hard to forget because he burst upon the national stage as the golden-tongued lawyer who was famous for defending the rights of the unborn.

According to writer Douglas Johnson in National Review, “in 1985, John Edwards stood before a jury and channeled the words of an unborn baby girl. In his closing argument to the jury, Edwards conveyed what the unborn child, Jennifer Campbell, purportedly had been feeling hour-by-hour as her distress grew.

“She speaks to you through me,” Edwards told the jury. “And I have to tell you right now—I didn’t plan to talk about this—right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

Edwards won that lawsuit and went on to file at least 20 similar lawsuits in the years following, achieving verdicts and settlements of more than $60 million for his clients.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/beto-orourke-democrats-condemn-america-as-racist/

Slavery was America’s grave sin, but to pretend racism is the essence of the country is an odious and reductive lie.

Beto O’Rourke has taken the measure of America and found it wanting.

“This country, though we would like to think otherwise,” he intoned over the weekend, “was founded on racism, has persisted through racism, and is racist today.”

This is now a mainstream sentiment in the Democratic party. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.” The New York Times has begun the so-called 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the importation of slaves from Africa.

The series seeks nothing less than “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

It is certainly true that an American nation existed prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and that slavery was its great sin, with permutations still felt today. But to pretend that racism is the essence of America and constituted one of the country’s founding principles is an odious and reductive lie.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/19/trump-slapped-the-country-awake-but-his-opponents-still-sleep/

Our new political landscape is exposing the limitations and biases of those whose well-being is dependent upon our old political landscape.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will introduced me to conservatism. As an energetic journalism major in the post-Watergate ’70s intent on changing the world, I subscribed to Mother Jones, The Progressive, and Newsweek magazines for guidance and soaked up everything those proud left-leaning journals dispensed. And then, on the inside back page of Newsweek, I’d come across Will’s biweekly counter to virtually everything else I had read.

What a wordsmith! What a brilliant, encyclopedic mind. How could someone advocating for those awful non-progressive things he championed make so much sense? In the tug-o-war for hearts and minds, I was the tape on the rope. Mother Jones fought spiritedly. But Will, in time, pulled me across the line. Which makes it doubly hard to watch him repeat the errors so many others make when considering Donald Trump.

Those errors include—let’s use some worn but applicable clichés—emphasizing style over substance, missing the forest for the trees, getting caught up in the times (something you wouldn’t expect a history buff like Will to do) and indulging a detestable Beltway culture.

The errors were on display earlier this summer when Will appeared at the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival to promote his new book, The Conservative Sensibility.

Will told his interviewer, PBS’s Judy Woodruff, that Trump’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in its pages “because it’s a book about ideas.” (Audience gets the joke and chuckles knowingly.) He said Trump isn’t a conservative, a charge he also levied against the Republican Party he quit four years ago. (Actually, Trump governs more conservatively than most Republicans in Congress.)

Donald J. TrumpVerified account @realDonaldTrump

Israel was very respectful & nice to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, allowing her permission to visit her “grandmother.” As soon as she was granted permission, she grandstanded & loudly proclaimed she would not visit Israel. Could this possibly have been a setup? Israel acted appropriately!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/18/cosmic-injustice/

One of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority. These progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States and thus can impotently theorize about problems elsewhere when they cannot solve those in their own midst.

Big-city mayors are especially culpable when it comes to ignoring felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe. Notice how New York Mayor Bill De Blasio lords over the insidious deterioration of his city while he lectures on cosmic white supremacy.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg used to sermonize to the nation about gun-control, global warming, the perils of super-sized soft drinks, smoking, and fatty-foods in his efforts to virtue signal his moral fides—even as his New York was nearly paralyzed by the 2010 blizzard that trapped millions of his city’s residents in their homes due to inept and incompetent city efforts to remove snow. Or is the “Bloomberg syndrome” worse than that—in the sense that sounding saintly in theory psychologically compensates for being powerless in fact? Or is it a fashion tic of the privileged to show abstract empathy?

In the last years of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship, Arnold more or less gave up on the existential crises of illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, soaring taxes, water shortages, decrepit roads and bridges, homelessness, plummeting public school performance, and a huge exodus out of state of middle-class Californians.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274656/tlaib-and-omar-werent-banned-disagreeing-israel-robert-spencer

It is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone except the most blinkered Leftist ideologue that Ilhan Omar’s response to being banned from entering Israel, along with her fellow antisemitic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, was outstandingly disingenuous. But she knows, when she retails her outrageous falsehoods, that the establishment media will never call her on them or reveal the true depths of her alliance with jihadis and agitation against Israel.

“The irony of the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East making such a decision,” said Omar, “is that it is both an insult to democratic values and a chilling response to a visit by government officials from an allied nation.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to restore some realism and honesty to the discussion, saying: “As a free and vibrant democracy,” he said, “Israel is open to critics and criticism, with one exception: Israeli law prohibits the entry into Israel of those who call for, and work to impose, boycotts on Israel, as do other democracies that prevent the entry of people believed to be damaging to the country.”

There’s the rub. Omar and Tlaib are not just Congresswomen with opinions that are critical of Israel. They are not just spokesmen; they are activists. They are active apologists for the jihad terror networks Hamas and Hizballah. The Washington Examiner reported in May that “Rep. Ilhan Omar appeared to take the side of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Sunday night after terrorists fired hundreds of rockets at civilian targets in Israel this weekend.” Omar tweeted: “How many more protesters must be shot, rockets must be fired, and little kids must be killed until the endless cycle of violence ends? The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable. Only real justice can bring about security and lasting peace.” About Hamas’ genocidal incitement and celebration of the murders of Israeli civilians she was silent. Nor has she ever uttered a murmur of protest against the fact that Hamas is dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel, which, if it ever happened, would result in the deaths of millions of Israelis.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-isnt-the-one-dividing-us-by-race-11566158729

Long before the El Paso massacre, President Trump’s political opponents accused him of sowing “division” with his “racist language.” Mr. Trump “exploits race,” “uses race for his gain,” is engaged in a “racially divisive reprise” of his 2016 campaign, stokes “racial resentments,” and puts “race at the fore,” the New York Times has reported over the past several months.

Yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity.

Some examples: “As race dominates the political conversation, 10 white Democratic candidates will take the stage” (the Washington Post); Mr. Trump’s rally audiences are “overwhelmingly white” (multiple sources); your son’s “whiteness is what protects him from not [sic] being shot” by the police ( Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ); white candidates need to be conscious of “white privilege” (South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg ); “white supremacy manifests itself” in the criminal-justice, immigration and health-care systems ( Sen. Cory Booker ); “ Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” ( Sen. Elizabeth Warren ); whiteness is “the very core” of Mr. Trump’s power, whereas his “predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness” (Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic).