RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity—and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
~Niall Ferguson

I was wrong.

For a long time, I considered the loose collection of ideas and assumptions I will call “progressivism” to be a regrettable but mostly tolerable side effect of affluence. This quasi-ideology—espoused by prominent progressives from the academy and Vox to Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren—holds that, inter alia: (1) All demographic groups are roughly equal on all socially valued traits; (2) racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry are ubiquitous; (3) almost all demographic disparities are caused by unfair discrimination; (4) diversity is an unalloyed good; and (5) there are many bigots who stand in the way of social progress, but eventually history will redeem the noble and we will inhabit a just society.

Wealth frees a person from immediate survival concerns and therefore increases the importance of symbolic identities. And this, coupled with youth’s natural affinity for rebellion, almost inevitably leads to at least a passing phase of identity-based radicalism. So while others sounded the tocsin, proclaiming this a grave threat to social sanity, I remained skeptical. Of course, I agreed that social justice ideologies were often odious and possibly pernicious, especially inside the elite institutions where they most rapidly proliferated; but, I also thought that alarmism about the problem was equally unhelpful, diverting limited cognitive resources from more constructive activities.

However, I am no longer skeptical. I have come to believe that the hostility to the West embedded in this kind of thinking and activism is a serious and growing problem. It is therefore critical that we understand the motives that drive it and the conditions that enable it, and that we challenge its erroneous assumptions and persuade others of its corrosiveness, preferably without alienating those who find it appealing but are also willing to listen to reasonable objections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h5iv6sECGU&feature=youtu.be

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22437/selling-socialism-to-america

Socialism is a tough sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on facts and a remarkably easy sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on feelings. The adult world of facts is a foreign land to the infantilized world of feelings where low-info millennial voters currently dwell. The heated political battle between Americanism and Socialism parallels the battle between parents and their children who refuse to grow up emotionally and leave the nest.

Becoming an emotional adult requires embracing a fact based cause-and-effect view of the world that rejects the fantasies of childhood. “No Johnny, you cannot fly like a bird even though you really really really want to.” What happens if Johnny insists that he can fly and takes a confident leap from a tall building?

Socialism and Johnny have a lot in common – both insist they can do what objective reality proves they cannot do.

So, what is the problem?

America is being challenged by a Peter Pan generation that refuses to grow up and lives in a world of subjective reality where feelings rather than facts determine public policy. Their fragile selves require enforced political correctness and safe spaces to protect them from unwelcome facts and opposing ideas. Johnny climbs to the top of a tall building because he “feels” like a bird – he refuses to accept the fact that he is a human being and cannot fly. Human beings have limitations just like Socialism does.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/the-

Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation.

The 1969 Vietnam War protests on the UC Berkeley campus turned so violent that National Guard helicopters indiscriminately sprayed tear gas on student demonstrators. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities as part of the “Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam.” In Washington, D.C., about a half-million protesters marched to the White House.

Native American demonstrators took over the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and stayed there for 19 months, declaring it their own sovereign space.

In November 1969, the American public was exposed to grotesque photos of the My Lai Massacre, which had occurred the year before. The nation was stunned that American troops in Vietnam had shot innocent women and children. My Lai heated up the already hot national debate over whether the Vietnam War was either moral or winnable.

Meanwhile, the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven, involving the supposed organizers of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, roiled the nation. The courtroom drama involving radical defendants such as Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin descended into a national circus, as the battle between leftists and the establishment went from the streets to the courtroom.

It was also the year of the Woodstock music festival. More than 400,000 thrill-seekers showed up on a small farm in the Catskill Mountains in August 1969 to celebrate three days of “peace and music.” Footage of free love and free drugs at Woodstock shocked half the country but resonated with the other half, which viewed the festival as much-needed liberation for an uptight nation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273040/post-child-democrats-daniel-greenfield

Kill 100,000 babies a year and maybe global temperatures will drop.

“Is it okay to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wondered while making a salad.

“It’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question.”

It’s easy to dismiss her, but the loudest proponent of a Green New Deal doesn’t come up with original ideas, she just snatches extreme lefty ideas already being mainstreamed, and dumbs them down into a ridiculous and easily digestible form. Cortez hadn’t come up with the idea of cracking down on air travel or cows. And she hadn’t invented environmentalist proposals for human extinction on her own.

“Is It Cruel to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?” the New Republic had asked.

“If the looming 12-year deadline is missed,” the formerly liberal, and now radically leftist publication, suggested, “what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall?”

“Bringing children into a decaying world, without even the opportunity to do something about it, seems a cruel fate to inflict on someone, especially your own child.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-resistance-government-anonymous-james-baker-samantha-power/

The same old, same old faces

W e are still trying to fathom the apparent but transient palace-coup attempts of Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe. No one has gotten to the bottom of the serial lying by McCabe and James Comey, much less their systematic and illegal leaking to pet reporters.

We do not know all the ways in which James Clapper and John Brennan seeded the dossier and its related gossip among the press and liberal politicians — only that both were prior admitted fabricators who respectively while under oath misled congressional representatives on a host of issues.

The central role of Hillary Clinton in funding the anti-Trump, Russian-“collusion,” Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele dossier is still not fully disclosed. Did the deluded FISA court know it was being used by Obama-administration DOJ and FBI officials, who withheld from it evidence to ensure permission to spy on American citizens? Could any justice knowingly be so naïve?

Do we remember at all that Devin Nunes came to national prominence when he uncovered information that members of the Obama administration’s national-security team, along with others, had systematically unmasked surveilled Americans, whose names then were leaked illegally to the press?

One day historians will have the full story of how Robert Mueller stocked his legal team inordinately with partisans. He certainly did not promptly disclose the chronology of, or the interconnected reasons for, the firings of Lisa Page and Peter Strozk. And his team has largely used process-crime allegations to leverage mostly minor figures to divulge some sort of incriminating evidence about the president — none of it pertaining to the original mandated rationale of collusion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272993/why-do-progressives-reject-policies-would-achieve-bruce-thorntonhttps://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272993/why-do-progressives-reject-policies-would-achieve-bruce-thornton

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Sesame Street) has delivered yet another statement that bespeaks the progressives’ chronic myopia. This time she’s pondering the dilemma about whether or not it’s “still okay to have children,” given the apocalyptic future being created by climate change. The point has nothing to do with demography, as birth-rates in the U.S. are already starting to decline. The real point, of course, is to rouse the old progressive battle-cry of a “crisis” that “urgently” needs resolving, mainly by increasing the power and rapacity of bloated federal agencies and their growth-killing regulations.The solution championed by the warmists comprises various schemes to drastically reduce or eliminate energy derived from carbon. But everyone admits that the reductions, even if achieved, would not be enough to stop the alleged catastrophic warming, but would certainly devastate the economy. Meanwhile, the real solutions for progressives to get what they want lies with the free market that increases global wealth.

The scandal of alarmist climate change, of course, is that the policy prescriptions are useless for slowing warming. As environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, who believes in human-induced global warming, writes,The IPCC says carbon emissions need to peak right now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models actually reveal that to achieve the 2.7-degree goal the world must stop all fossil fuel use in less than four years. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 fossil fuels will still meet three-quarters of world energy needs, even if the Paris agreement is fully implemented. The U.N. body responsible for the accord estimates that if every country fulfills every pledge by 2030, CO2 emissions will be cut by 60 billion tons by 2030. That’s less than 1% of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2.7 degrees. And achieving even that fraction would be vastly expensive—reducing world-wide growth $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year by 2030.

https://spectator.us/victor-davis-hanson-trump-paradox

John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is the unloved Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion, the community he has saved symbolically closing the door on him.

If he is lucky, President Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate. By his very excesses, Trump has already lost in conventional terms of being admired or considered presidential, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.

No one can still quite calibrate whether Trump’s combativeness and take-no-prisoners management style always hurts him as president, or is a necessary continuum of his persona that ensured his unlikely election and early political effectiveness as president. And no one quite knows either whether Trump’s inexplicable outbursts are sometimes planned by design to unnerve his critics and the media, or are instead spontaneous expressions of indiscipline and crudity. Conventional wisdom squares these circles by concluding that Trump’s ferocity shores up his base, but his base is not large enough to give him a reliable 51 percent popularity rating among voters. Most also have concluded that Trump’s unorthodox style, speech, and comportment likewise are designed to advance his agendas, but are usually overtaken by his fury. But how often the last three years has conventional wisdom been right?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/03/pigs-on-two-

Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community.

In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.

Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.

Now even the divine Obama is having his ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/02/a-bulwark

In keeping with the annual custom, a progressive journalist attended this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., with the sole purpose of mocking the event.

The self-admitted liberal posted an ongoing Twitter screed that made fun of several CPAC speakers, including a beloved, elderly man recovering from a brutal bout with cancer. She questioned why so many pro-life, pro-gun and anti-socialists were among the 10,000 attendees, but concluded it must be because Trump supporters are “poorly educated.”

A college dropout herself, the reporter nonetheless tried to shame Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also for being a college dropout. Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), among others, were on the receiving end of her unfunny, unimaginative insults. “We’re listening to a bearded Ted Cruz fellating Donald J Trump,” she tweeted Friday morning.

She seemed confused at discussions about conservatives being stifled by Big Tech companies and wondered why there was so much hostility toward the news media. She laughed off criticism of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the Green New Deal, and Planned Parenthood. “I’m happy to have the night off and not have someone screaming at me about socialism,” she tweeted on Friday.

When she was confronted on social media about her hostility to pro-lifers, she proudly brandished her pro-abortion credentials, which included a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that defended late-term abortion after she considered having one herself. “How dare I say an anti-choice panel was anti-choice. Owned.”

No, the reporter—Molly Jong-Fast—doesn’t work for the New York Times or MSNBC. She is a freelancer for The Bulwark, a new site that claims it will save conservatism from the clutches of Trumpism. “As much of the Right descends into sophism and trollery, we will be a forum for rational, principled, fact-based conservative commentary,” wrote The Bulwark’s editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes when the site launched in January.