RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16266/law-and-justice

For me, the real enemies of America are the extremists on both sides: the hard left that would bring America down, the hard right white supremacists and neo‑Nazis…. People from the hard left do not even want to hear from people on the center left.

I think the last thing The New York Times wants is for people to come to their own conclusion, because The New York Times bars dissenting points of view and fired editors who authorize them to be published on its pages…. The Times has taken the “op” out of “op-ed.”

The combination of elected prosecutors and elected judges has made our legal system far too political. Too many decisions are made by people, crowds, and pressure groups. When you combine four aspects of our system — prosecutors are elected, judges are elected, juries are ordinary, lay people, and the judges who control the juries are often subject to re‑election — the risks of our justice system being turned over to the masses, to the mobs, to the crowds, to the chanters, becomes all too real, and our system of checks and balances becomes weaker.

Remember that when America was founded at the end of the 18th century, the greatest fear was of the mob. We were watching what was happening a little later on in France with the revolution, and with the killing of so many innocent people in the name of the revolution.

In China, some years ago, I was invited to go to a trial, a man who was accused of stealing some items. After the evidence came in — you had evidence from the prosecution, the defendant testified — and then the judge ordered the doors opened. Hundreds of people poured in from the streets. The judge said, “Now we’ll hear from the masses.” The masses started yelling, “Convict! Convict! Convict!” Of course, the judge convicted, because the masses were the ones in a communist country who had control over the justice system. I never want to see that happen in the United States of America

It is very hard to be a dissenter today. If you are a dissenter today, you risk being canceled. If you are an editor who is willing to publish dissenting material, you risk being fired. If you are a dissenter today in a crowd, you risk being beaten up.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16267/illusory-superiority

Illusory Superiority is a quality that now afflicts many in public policy who think they know most things better than the mayor, the governor, or the president.

This is an army of professional “seldom right – but never in doubt” individuals who seem to be singularly unphased by their ability to get so much so wrong.

If the goal of the newspaper is brainwashing and indoctrination, like Russia’s Pravda, its executives, of course, are perfectly right to harness thought; but that is a business decision about profits and market share. It should not be confused with journalism.

Those in politics, whether staff or politicians, possessed of illusory superiority may well bring down the republic. Quite a few seem convinced that by losing the executive branch, the House and the Senate, they are somehow saving the country rather than actually pulling the grenade-pin that will bring about the collapse of the nation’s economy, free-speech, and our very future.

We all know someone whose favorite pastime seems to be knowing something about everything better than anyone.

You know.

The one who lamented to a friend, “I told my husband he should not have sold that stock!”

“Well,” was the response, “Then maybe, you would like to invest some of your own money yourself?”

That was, apparently, not the right answer. Still, that sardonic exchange, labeled, “illusory superiority,” and once confined to inconsequential conversation, has now seeped into our political world, harming the ability to voice opinions, destroying open campus debate, and creating an environment that despite the opinion of the voters, allows government staff to view itself as far smarter than the person elected to office.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Fear is an elemental emotion. It can have positive attributes. In combat, fear is a governor on impulse. Fear of wild animals and other tribes was a factor in early man’s forming of communities. It is ubiquitous. We have fears of darkness and loneliness, of failure or rejection, of making wrong decisions. We fear becoming ill or being a burden to loved ones. Fear, we were told by Bertrand Russell, is the main source of superstition. Fear of sorcery was behind the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, which saw fourteen women and five men hung. It descends from ignorance, which wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick, “is the parent of fear.” Unwarranted fear prevents us from expanding our horizons and improving our lives.  

Unscrupulous politicians use fear to seek and hold power. Tyrant-like, they tell us what cannot be done. Classical liberals, like the Founding Fathers, tell us what rights we have – what can be done. With COVID-19, fear has been used for political gain. By the end of 2019, President Trump’s policies had accelerated economic growth. They had provided the lowest unemployment on record, including Black unemployment. Increases in wages for low-income workers outpaced pay rises for upper-income workers. Amir Taheri, the Iranian-born, Europe-based author, wrote: “Prior to the coronavirus crisis, his [Trump’s] administration had one of the best records in job creation and the reduction of poverty among black Americans.” Since the economy is the single most important aspect in a Presidential election, Mr. Trump’s glidepath to re-election, while by no means assured, appeared to have few – and manageable – obstacles.

The arrival of COVID-19 and the resulting shut-down of schools, colleges and the economy changed election dynamics. There is no question that COVID-19 was (and is) a serious health concern, particularly for the elderly and especially for those with comorbidities. Nevertheless, fear was the instrument employed by politicians of both parties. While younger people could (and do) contact the disease, and potentially contaminate riskier segments of the population, the risk to their health was not much worse than that of a bad case of the flu. We will never know what death counts would have been had there been no early shutdowns, but we do know the death tolls from the flu pandemics of 1917-19, 1957-58 and 1968, when there was no shuttering of the economy or schools. Adjusted for changes in population, death rates, with the exception of 1917-1919, were worse during the previous pandemics. In fact, in speaking to friends with whom I was at school in 1957-58 not one had any memory of the flu that year. Yet it killed 116,000 Americans when the population was about one half of what it is today.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/20/reopening_schools_and_the_limi

The last thing you want to hear from your brain surgeon (aside from “Oops”) is “Wow, I’ve always wanted to do one of these.” You’ll feel a lot better hearing, “I’ve done 30 operations like this over the past month and published several articles about them.”

Expertise like that is essential for brain surgery, building rockets, constructing skyscrapers, and much, much more. Our modern world is built upon it. We need such expert advice as we decide whether to open schools this fall, and we should turn to educators, physicians, and economists to get it. But ultimately we, as citizens and the local officials we elect, should make the choices. These are not technical decisions but political ones that incorporate technical issues and projections. We should hold our representatives, not the experts, responsible for the choices they make.

When we listen to experts, we should remember Clint Eastwood’s comment in “Magnum Force”:  “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Even the best authorities have them, and one, ironically, is that they seldom admit them, even to themselves. It is important for us both to appreciate expert advice and to recognize its limits every time we’re told to “be quiet and do what they say.” We should listen, think it over, and then make our own decisions as citizens, parents, teachers, business owners, workers, retirees — and voters.

The best way to understand why we need experts but also why we need to weigh their advice, not swallow it whole and uncooked, is to consider this illustration: Should we build a hydroelectric dam in a beautiful valley? If we construct it, we certainly need the best engineers and construction workers. We need engineering firms to project the cost and economists to project the price of its energy and potable water. Their expertise is essential.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/19/will-2021-be-1984/

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.” 

Strong-man Baathists, Iranian Khomeinists, and the German National Socialists claimed they hated capitalism. So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power. These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the hundreds of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

Vice President as President

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.

It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline—and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/charles-jacobs-video-do-black-slaves-lives-matter-frontpagemagcom/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Dr. Charles Jacobs, the president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Dr. Jacobs discusses Do Black Slaves’ Lives Matter?, shedding a disturbing light on: When did the Left first go woke? When they betrayed black slaves.

He takes us into the horrific world of Racist Muslim Arabs Barbarizing Black Slaves in Africa.

Don’t miss it:

https://www.jns.org/opinion/buddy-korn-jewish-activist-journalist-mentor-and-mensch/

Bertram (Benyamin) “Buddy” Korn, a Jewish activist, journalist, and community organizer, passed away on July 5 at the age of 64 shortly after contracting COVID-19. His contributions to the Jewish community were vast, and it was more often behind the scenes than not that we benefited from his work without knowing it.

Korn’s passing should not occur without examination of his unparalleled influences on the Jewish community that he loved so dearly. As one of the founders of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), and later as a Jewish newspaper editor in Florida and Philadelphia, he began his work defending Israel in the media, and at the same time grooming a generation of mission-driven journalists for the Jewish community.

His work as a pro-Israel grassroots organizer and community-builder took on a myriad of forms: He volunteered in CAMERA’s D.C. office before helping guide its relaunch as a national organization (in addition to his leadership of CAMERA’s Philadelphia office). Later, he worked with various organizations as a paid professional, board member and adviser. Zionist and religious organizations, and Holocaust-educational efforts, benefited from his hard work.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16257/curse-him-then-copy-him

In elite circles, notably in Europe, Trump-bashing is regarded as a sign of intelligence and cursing him a duty of progressive humanists.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned and won on a Trumpian platform of national identity and industrial revival. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel, a sneaky critic of Trump, now talks of the need for a bigger defense budget, curbs on globalization and Russia as a threat.

Last month, however, he [French President Emmanuel Macron] adopted a Trumpian stance against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) lava that had reached France. He said he would not allow French history to be re-written and the police to be insulted; nor would he let anyone topple statues or change street names. He rejected what he called “separatism”, attempts at conjuring double-barrel identities such as “African-French”.

In his idiosyncratic, not to say gauche, style Trump attacked domestic and foreign policies that no longer worked. He also tried to rebalance globalization to halt the long-term de-industrialization of the United States. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, his administration had one of the best records in job creation and the reduction of poverty among black Americans.

By all accounts, Donald J Trump is an atypical character among the men who have served as President of the United States. That maybe the reason for the atypically hostile, often violent, sentiments he provokes among political foes.

In elite circles, notably in Europe, Trump-bashing is regarded as a sign of intelligence and cursing him a duty of progressive humanists.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/18/our-worship-of-power-over-truth/

Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, an admonition. Our woke social justice warriors, supposing they are even aware of Orwell’s work, would seem to regard it as a plan of action, a how-to manual.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about “purity spirals.” That’s what the journalist Gavin Haynes calls the familiar “moral feeding frenzy” that occurs whenever ideology triumphs over truth. The French Revolution provides vivid historical examples, as did Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s. Those caught in a purity spiral, I observed, invariably find themselves embarked on an endless search for enemies, “a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, ‘is always one of purer-than-thou.’”

It is also, not incidentally, a contest to subordinate truth to the accumulation of power. 

In the course of that piece, I quoted the columnist Andrew Sullivan, who expatiated on the role that language—and the effort to police language—plays in the economy of coercion. 

“Revolutionaries,” he wrote, “also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order.” And how. 

Sullivan was writing in New York magazine, a reliably trendy, i.e., left-wing, redoubt that had been his home for the past several years. I employ the pluperfect in the preceding, because Sullivan has just been defenestrated from that increasingly woke organ. 

“A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me,” he wrote in a decorous but devastating farewell column. 

They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media.