RUTHFULLY YOURS

EXCERPT- FROM AUSTRALIA-https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/rebels-without-a-pause/

Global news coverage of the riots, looting and arson that spread across America portrayed the “protests” as a righteous response to racially-tinged police brutality. Murder is murder, and the video footage of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd is chilling indeed. Concerned bystanders repeatedly asked, then yelled at the police to stop. Floyd already had his hands cuffed behind his back, and there were at least four armed officers on the scene, so it’s unlikely that he could have posed any threat. Chauvin awaits the verdict of a jury of his peers.

Meanwhile America faces the jury of the press corps, which has fallen in love with the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, an attractive young millennial who in looks, speech and politics resembles nothing so much as an American Justin Trudeau. He is a Democrat—the top five candidates in the city’s Australian-style transferable preference voting system were all Democrats—who campaigned on a platform of (wait for it) police reform. Frey wanted to hire an additional 400 officers in a bid to reshape the force. The coronavirus put paid to that.

In America’s mirror-image political colour scheme, Minneapolis is the bluest of blue cities in a consistently blue state. It is represented in Congress by the Somali-American former refugee Ilhan Omar. After going heavily for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, Minnesota (the state of which Minneapolis is the capital) voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the ensuing presidential election. If the Derek Chauvin riots (it seems unfair to associate them with the apparently peaceable George Floyd) are a product of the divided America we hear so much about, it’s an America divided between African-Americans and the Democrats who govern them.

Nearly all the cities that have been hit hard by riots and looting are long-time bastions of the Democratic Party. Yet when the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe “you ain’t black” Biden, said in a teary-eyed video plea that George Floyd was a victim of America’s “original sin” of “systemic racism”, the media lapped it up. Biden’s written follow-up statement condemning looting and rioting was less well reported. Not that he called it “looting” or “rioting”. He wrote that “protest” was “an utterly American response” to injustice, but that “burning down communities” and “violence that endangers lives” were not. One out of three ain’t bad.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/01/the-choice-before-us/

Somehow, news that the Antifa-Black Lives Matter nexus burned a stack of Bibles in front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland the other night put me in mind of President Trump’s magisterial speech in Krasinski Square, Warsaw, just over three years ago.

A short digression: has any other modern president delivered so many brilliant speeches? The Warsaw speech was tip-top, but then so was his 2020 State of the Union speech and, just last month, his magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore. And let’s not forget his speech before both Houses of Congress in 2017 or his speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations that same year. Barn-burners all. 

I said at the time that the president’s Warsaw speech was worthy of comparison with Pericles’ Funeral Oration as described by Thucydides. Naturally, that comment occasioned much obloquy, but mostly, I’d wager, from people who have never read Thucydides. 

Mounting a wide-ranging and spirited defense of core Western values and achievements, Trump noted that what made the West so important was not just its wealth and power. Equally important was its commitment to such enabling civilizational values as individual liberty, the rule of law, religious freedom, and a generous and innovative spirit of curiosity and exploration. “The world has never known anything like our community of nations,” Trump said. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-captive-mind-and-americas-resegregation-11596222112?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

Czesław Miłosz, a future Nobel Prize-winning poet who had just defected from Poland, began work in 1951 on a book called “The Captive Mind.” Even as Stalinist totalitarianism tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, many Western European intellectuals lauded the brave new world of Soviet communism as a model for overcoming “bourgeois forces,” which in their view had caused World War II. Living in Paris, Miłosz wrote his book, which was published in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system. 

Miłosz knew from experience, having lived through the Communist takeover, how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state and obliterating what had taken centuries of Western political development to achieve. Totalitarianism not only enslaved people physically but crippled their spirit. It did so by replacing ordinary human language, in which words signify things in the outside world, with ideologically sanctioned language, in which words signify the dominant party’s ever-changing ideas of what is and is not true.

Since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, nationwide protests, which quickly turned to riots, have been hijacked by the neo-Marxist left, morphing into an all-out assault on American cities and institutions. This assault is underpinned by an audacious attempt to rewrite history that turns specific past events into weapons not only to overpower political opponents but also to recast all of American history as a litany of racial transgressions.

   https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-the-confused-and-pointless-rage-of-an-entitled-generation/

What happens when you take a generation of people, carefully instill in them an overriding sense of entitlement, give them lives of immeasurable comfort and ease, grant them every right and liberty known to man, but then at the same time tell them, somehow, incredibly, that they are oppressed — and then finally, after decades of this sort of schizophrenic conditioning, grant them free reign to express their confused and unearned rage in whatever way they desire, including felony vandalism and assault? Well, we are now seeing the results of that social experiment, and they are as ugly as expected — the country witnessing an eruption in rioting and mayhem by members of what the Feds generally describe as “violent anarchist” groups.

Indeed, the entitlement of these left-wing “protesters” — many of whom are white and by the Left’s own terms “privileged” — is the most striking and inescapable thing about them. These are people who believe they actually have the God-given — or whoever-given — right to shut down roads, stop traffic, intimidate, harass, assault, burn, loot, and pillage, without consequence. They really believe they have this right.

For example, DC activist Julia Clark posted a lengthy Twitter thread over the weekend complaining about cars that kept driving down roads that she and her comrades had decided to close. Of course they had no authority to close any roads at all, but that is a minor detail in Julia Clark’s mind. If Julia Clark decides that a road is closed, well then, damn it, it’s closed. And that’s all there is to it.

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1288144511433150464

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/five-reasons-be-cheerful-katie-hopkins/

With so many people feeling stressed out and at odds with the world, I feel it is my duty as Energizer to try and install some much-needed good humor and optimism into our team.

I appreciate there is an awful lot of darkness out there and more bad news than for CNN on election night, but there are many more reasons to be cheerful. Here are just five:

[1] You are on the same team as Louie Gohmert.

When my young son asks me which superhero I would like to be, I always answer Louie Gohmert. Texas is blessed to have him.

The one-man fighting machine introduced a resolution on the floor of the House to ban the Democrat Party.

Everybody knows that slavery has been pushed and protected by the Democratic Party, they are the ones that pushed Jim Crow laws….So if we are going to hold the Democrats to the same standards they want to hold everybody else to and get rid of any vestiges of slavery, it means getting rid of the Democratic party.

All Congressman Gohmert needs is a red cape and some tight blue pants with his briefs worn on the outside and we can legitimately call him Super-Louie.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/milwaukee-shooting-victim-trump-supporter

A Milwaukee homicide victim has been identified as a well-liked fixture of the city’s Black community who supported Black Lives Matter and President Trump.

Bernell Trammell, 60, was shot and killed Thursday afternoon in front of a storefront with signs in the window supporting Trump’s reelection. according to reports. He ran a small business from the storefront.

A makeshift memorial grew in size at the spot where he was killed, according to Fox 6 Milwaukee.

“The guy was just full of love,” Dick Nelson said, according to the station.

His last known conversation was with a blogger on the morning of the shooting.

Bernell Trammell, 60, was gunned down in from of his Milwaukee storefront Thursday afternoon. (Facebook)

The chat with Adebisi Agoro took place as Trammell held a sign that said “Wisconsin Vote Donald Trump 2020,” the station reported.

“He’s just a community figure,” Agoro told the station. “I respected him just because he had a position…He’s got his opinion on why he feels that way; and I’m not going to knock him.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/27/its_time_to_crush_the_new_rebellion_against_constitution_143803.html

Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked an interesting question of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany at last Tuesday’s press briefing:

“Where in the Constitution does the president derive the authority to send federal law enforcement officers to the streets of American cities against the will of the elected officials in those cities?”

McEnany, as it turned out, was prepared. Section 1315 of Title 40 of the U.S. Code, she explained, “gives DHS the ability to deputize officers in any department or agency like ICE, Custom and Border Patrol and Secret Service … for the duties in connection with the protection of property owned or occupied by the federal government.”

She added, “When a federal courthouse is being lit on fire, commercial fireworks being shot at it [and] being shot at the officers, I think that falls pretty well within the limits of 40 U.S. Code 1315.”

Since violent thugs have targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., it was an appropriate response, but it didn’t directly answer Karl’s question, which asked about constitutional authority for the use of federal force. It is a question worth asking, in part because there are many urban areas in the United States currently under similar attack but where no federal property is involved.

https://www.startribune.com/racial-justice-the-new-religion/571899352/?refresh=true

Since the death of George Floyd, a movement that condemns America as “systemically racist” has convulsed our public consciousness. Sixty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — and despite decades of affirmative action, massive social welfare spending and a two-term Black president — we are told that “white supremacy” deforms America today, as it has throughout history.

The movement to eradicate “white privilege” manifests in demands to defund police and in the toppling of statues — not only of Confederate generals, but of figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, even George Washington.

Educational, business, media, nonprofit and entertainment institutions have taken up the “systemic racism” mantra with breathtaking speed, issuing statements declaring their virtue and right thinking.

Yet something is profoundly amiss in the frenzied movement that has America in its grip. This movement elevates passion over reason and dogma over data. It contemptuously rejects, and attempts to silence, calls for objective analysis as self-evidently racist.