RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/22/cant-we-all-just-get-along/

Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why.

“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.”

Of the Republican Party, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes said the other day: “It must be peacefully, nonviolently, politically destroyed with love, compassion and determination, but utterly confronted and destroyed. That is the only way to break the coalition apart… Not by prying off this or that interest. They are in too deep. They have shamed themselves too much. The heart of the thing must be ripped out. The darkness must be banished.”

In other words, the new progressive message is that we all must vote monolithically and predicated on our superficial appearance, religion, or sexual orientation. And the Trump base must be destroyed, though annihilated with “love” and “compassion.”

Love It—Or What Actually?
All are presently shocked that Donald Trump would dare suggest that if anyone did not like the United States, then perhaps he or she might, of their own volition, consider leaving the country.

Trump apparently was directing his ire exclusively at particular first-generation congresswomen and suggesting that their anti-American furor logically might lead such unhappy U.S. citizens to consider voluntary deportation.

Perhaps no politician should ever advise American citizens with whom he disagrees to leave the country. But Trump did not suggest mandatory departures—in the manner that Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had wanted Trump supporter and immigrant Sebastian Gorka deported.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-19-who-are-the-racists-here

You can be forgiven if you have the impression that the entire argument of the Democratic party to voters at this point in time consists of yelling at the opposition, “You’re racists!” Or maybe sometimes it’s “You’re white supremacists!” But is there any substance to these charges?

The last few days have seen a near total meltdown, after President Trump tweeted (on July 14):

Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

No mention of race there, of course. Sounds to me like an invitation to the radical Congresswomen to start behaving like grown-ups and taking some responsibility for the absurd policy proposals that they throw around so recklessly. The Green New Deal for Somalia? I can only think it would take the impoverished Somalis from mere poverty to total destitution and starvation. But the “squad” thinks the Green New Deal is imperative for the U.S. Then why shouldn’t it also be the right policy path for Somalia? And if this plan is the route to a perfected world, what’s wrong with suggesting that its leading advocates bring some influence to bear on Somalia (or Palestine or Mexico) to implement their prescriptions? The backdrop of proposing Somalia for the GND seems to me like an excellent basis for an intelligent conversation about what policies might actually work in the real world.

So let’s get the reaction of Ilhan Omar (quoted at bbc.com July 16):

Ms Omar says Mr Trump’s “blatantly racist attack” on four women of colour was “the agenda of white nationalists.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/18/the

Lying has always been a part of politics. But what we’re seeing today is extreme. Politicians’ falsehoods, eagerly parroted by celebrities, are aided by a media that, rather than acting as an impartial referee, has become an agency for Democrats and the political left. Here are the top three whoppers since President Trump took office that those sick with Trump Derangement Syndrome just won’t let go of.

Trump’s Supporters Are Racist 

“Trump is, without question, a racist,” a senior writer at The Root named Michael Harriot, who identifies himself on his Twitter account as a “master race-baiter,” wrote recently in that publication. “And so are his supporters. Not some of them. All of them.” (Emphasis added by Harriot.)

On Sunday, the day President Trump posted his “go back home” tweet aimed at The Squad, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of the president’s targets, tweeted “Trump is a racist. If you still support him, so are you.”

A couple of months ago, a cable news exchange between CNN anchor John Berman and activist Michaela Angela Davis went this way:

Davis: I think it’s important we don’t make Trump seem this untouchable thing … that no one gets to be Trump but Trump. Tens of millions of people voted for him after he showed his cards for years.

Berman: But are you suggesting that they’re racist …

Davis: Absolutely yes. Yes.

Berman: All the people that voted for Donald Trump are racist?

Davis: Yes.

These charges are untrue on their face. If they were true, there would be nearly 63 million (Trump’s 2016 vote total) racists in this country. Or maybe more. Roughly 46% of the voters marked their ballots for Trump. If that share of voters represents the portion of Americans who support Trump, there are more than 150 million racists in the U.S. If either of these reflected reality, we would be in a race war. The same would be true if only 10% of Trump voters were racist. The violence would be daily and widespread. The Klan would ride again.

Yet, as many have pointed out, racism and racists have become marginalized in this country, almost to the point of nonexistence. Racism is so rare that people are faking hate crimes to support the narrative.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/17/the-war-over

The summer season has ripped off the thin scab that covered an American wound, revealing a festering disagreement about the nature and origins of the United States.

The San Francisco Board of Education recently voted to paint over, and thus destroy, a 1,600-square-foot mural of George Washington’s life in San Francisco’s George Washington High School.

Victor Arnautoff, a communist Russian-American artist and Stanford University art professor, had painted “Life of Washington” in 1936, commissioned by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. A community task force appointed by the school district had recommended that the board address student and parent objections to the 83-year-old mural, which some viewed as racist for its depiction of black slaves and Native Americans.

Nike pitchman and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick recently objected to the company’s release of a special Fourth of July sneaker emblazoned with a 13-star Betsy Ross flag. The terrified Nike immediately pulled the shoe off the market.

The New York Times opinion team issued a Fourth of July video about “the myth of America as the greatest nation on earth.” The Times’ journalists conceded that the United States is “just OK.”

During a recent speech to students at a Minnesota high school, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) offered a scathing appraisal of her adopted country, which she depicted as a disappointment whose racism and inequality did not meet her expectations as an idealistic refugee. Omar’s family had fled worn-torn Somalia and spent four-years in a Kenyan refugee camp before reaching Minnesota, where Omar received a subsidized education and ended up a congresswoman.

https://spectator.us/white-supremacy-phantom/

Well la-dee-dah. The House votes to condemn ‘President Trump for his “racist comments” about four Democratic congresswomen of color.’

First, I am glad that ‘racist comments’ was in scare quotes. Why? Because there was nothing racist about the president’s tweets inviting creeps like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar to leave the United States if she doesn’t like it here.  

Second, I wish people would give the phrase ‘people of color’ a rest. Everyone is a color — even, I suppose, Albinos (is that ‘racist’ now, too?). I, for example, am a pleasing pink. 

But the fact that someone is dark-skinned imparts to him no special virtue, just as the fact that someone is Caucasian saddles him with no special liability. 

Except, alas, that it does. At least in the racist court of identity politics. 

Please note the absence of scare quotes around ‘racist’ this time. It is one of the signal moral and intellectual deformations of our time that many people strain every action through the sieve of racial redress. The result is that a pretended campaign against racism is fueled by a thoroughly racist imperative. Remember that the next time someone condemns the phantom of ‘white supremacy.’ It is a category as vacuous as ‘counter-revolutionary’ for a paid-up Jacobin or ‘bourgeois capitalist’ for a Marxist. 

https://www.steynonline.com/9552/wokeness-at-warp-speed

A few months ago I observed to Tucker Carlson that the difference between “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was that the former was largely contained to a visceral loathing for the President himself, whereas the latter has been extended to anyone who voted for him – ie, the half of the electorate comprised of “racists”, “fascists” and “white supremacists”. Now TDS rampages on, to consume half the Democrats, too.

Say what you like about Nancy Pelosi, but she took back the House by running the Dems as a “moderate” party that talked about things like voter concern over health care. A year on, and most of what the party’s presidential candidates are yakking about – busing, the needs of trans-African-Americans, open borders to all six-and-a-half billion Undocumented-Americans around the world – is bonkers. The Democrat platform is a twitchy reflex that, whatever Trump is for, they’re against. So he wakes up every morning, tweets his rubber hammer at their kneecaps, and they respond accordingly. He doesn’t even have to hold any particular position: The actual Trump is utterly indifferent on the matter of “gender fluidity” and, from his experience as a businessman in Canada and Scotland, is not ill-disposed toward socialized health care. But the Trump of their fevers is a transphobe who wants to shove granny off a cliff, and that’s who they’re running against.

So the party of Big Government will no longer cooperate with the biggest government of all. Behold Eric Garcetti, mayor of a city the middle class is fleeing, where less and less works, where traffic is at a standstill, and you can’t get out and walk because the sidewalks are full of tent cities, human feces and flesh-eating viruses. And his priority is non-cooperation with ICE. And notice his artful pitch: Democrats have long abolished the distinction between “immigrants” and the millions who just walked into the country, which is why the Mayor sells his position to “Angelenos” as simply that of being a “good neighbor”. Are Mexico and Guatemala “good neighbors” to the United States? Does a “good neighbor” just move into the house next door and then demand you support him in his lawlessness?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/16/gop-look-like-peter-thiel-charge/

On July 14, the National Conservatism Conference started in Washington DC as the first public attempt to say what conservatism is after the Donald Trump election. It’s fitting that it’s organized by a new outfit, the Edmund Burke Foundation, created in January 2019 and chaired by Yoram Hazony, the scholar who became famous in 2018 for his book “The Virtue Of Nationalism,” and advised by Rusty Reno, editor of First Things and Chris DeMuth, the prominent conservative scholar of public policy (all three of whom are speakers at the conference).

A large number of other journalists, intellectuals, and scholars will give speeches—some famous, some not (here’s the list). The first striking thing is the absence of politicians speaking about the future of conservatism. Apparently, we are looking for ideas elsewhere, despite the GOP’s historic electoral victories in 2016. The exceptions are Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), recently famous for proposing a bill to use the federal government to enforce free speech requirements on social media corporations, and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Redefining and Popularizing Conservatism

The conference is nevertheless emphatically political, aimed not merely at redefining conservatism, but at making the case that it is a preferable alternative to the liberalism prevailing in elite institutions in America. The speakers are aiming to popularize new ideas to inspire politicians and political organizations.

In short, they want a new GOP fit for the political world shaking up after the 2016 election. There is something admirable and even noble about this attempt, but we should also see what the new ideas are and where they tend.

To start with, let us talk about Peter Thiel’s keynote address, which circulated widely. Thiel rarely makes political statements, but he shocked everyone by supporting Trump in 2016 and giving a passionate speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Now, he’s doubling down on some of his most surprising, unconventional ideas, which finally have their chance to become part of a party platform.

Thiel took aim at the most prestigious liberal institutions in our times: Silicon Valley and academia. He claimed they are only good for elite liberals and have become bad for America as a whole and directly inimical to the conservative half of America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/donald-trump-and-the-racist-tweets/

There’s a difference between racist and just stupid.

What does “racist” even mean anymore?

Racism is the headline on President Trump’s Sunday tweets — the media-Democrat complex assiduously describes them as “racist tweets” as if that were a fact rather than a trope. I don’t think they were racist; I think they were abjectly stupid.

Like many Americans, I am tired of being lectured about racism by racists and racialists, individuals whose full-field explanation for all life’s issues is this matter of genetic happenstance that should be increasingly irrelevant in a pluralistic society.

Is it “racist” to tell people who have contempt for the country — who abhor the common culture that makes us American — that they ought to go back to where they came from? It has nativist and reactionary overtones, but I don’t think it is racist. I’ll grant this much, though: It is closer to actual racism than the Left’s usual demagogic claim: I am a racist if I extend to a non-white nincompoop like Ilhan Omar the courtesy of taking her seriously as an individual and a public official, as if it were her race rather than the idiocy of what she says that moves me to dissent.

It would be racist to tell the progressive “Squad” that they don’t belong in our country because of their race or ethnic roots. I don’t understand Trump to have done that. He is attacking their radicalism, which they wear like a badge of honor.

I don’t believe Trump is a master strategist who did this to force Speaker Pelosi and other mainstream Democrats, at their electoral peril, to embrace the radicals. That’s just the lemonade that Trump supporters are trying to make of the president’s never-ending supply of lemons. In any event, while it is beneath a president to carp in Trump’s juvenile way, I have less heartburn in principle with a president’s attacking radicalism than I do with a congresswoman’s claim that any criticism of her is an implicit criticism of immigrants, women, black people, etc.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/16/trumps

When President Trump tweeted Sunday that “‘Progressive’ Democrat congresswomen” should “go back” to the countries they came from, the vapors swept through the political class and media. Granted, the tweet was crude. But the delivery should not invalidate the point.

Both parties condemned the tweet. And journalists, who can never find anything a Democrat says to even be mildly objectionable, or untrue, predictably responded as if Trump had hung a portrait of Hitler in the Oval Office, which is how they react nearly every time he opens his mouth or fires off a tweet. The backlash was more overheated than the tweet.

For the record, here’s the tweet in its entirety:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”