RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/we-cant-let-the-outrage-mob-win/

In the face of far-left radicalism, we must hold the line.

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about George Orwell’s chilling premonition over the past several weeks, as an ever-growing number of statues, books, movies, television shows, and even food brands have been canceled by the left-wing mob.

Though there is a legitimate debate to be had about Confederate symbols and statues, the mob never intended to stop there. Not even the most heroic of American figures are safe now. Not the father of our nation, George Washington. Not Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant, who delivered the death stroke to General Lee’s Confederate rebellion. Not Abraham Lincoln, whom Frederick Douglass called a “friend and liberator.” And not Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1905 spoke of the need to “secure to each man, whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment before the law.”

As Americans watch this unfold, many might ask: “Am I a bad person for not joining the mob? Have I failed to see the racism and oppression within these long-admired totems of our history? The mob seems so angry, and its anger must be proportionate to its righteousness, right?”

Wrong.

To Americans asking these questions: You are not the problem. The outrage mob is. Its breathless moralizing and anger do not portend reason or good faith, but instead mask deep ignorance and malicious intent.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/ag_barr_is_under_attack_by_most_of_the_media_and_other_democrats_because_they_believe_obama_admin_criminals_are_above_the_law.html

Most of the media and other Democrats are out to destroy AG Barr because they claim he has politicized the Justice Department, but that is clearly not true.

The Justice Department had been politicized throughout the Obama administration and no one in the mainstream media cared.

Eric Holder committed perjury more than once, was never charged, and called himself as Obama’s “wingman.” and most of the media and other Democrats didn’t care.

Eric Holder: ‘I’m still the president’s wingman’

Most of the media and other Democrats were not mad that Hillary Clinton and her aides got off for their crimes. They were mad that Comey told the public the crimes she committed. 

James Comey exonerates Hillary Clinton, July 5, 2016 (YouTube screen grab)

There were no hearings by Democrats on the politicization of the Justice Department. 

F.B.I. Director James Comey Recommends No Charges for Hillary Clinton on Email

Most of the media and other Democrats or career prosecutors and former Justice officials did not demand that AG Loretta Lynch resign when she met with Bill Clinton a few days before a pretend interview with Hillary. Of course, Lynch wanted any investigation into Hillary’s crimes termed as “matters” instead of an “investigation.” That shows candidate Clinton was going to get off no matter how many crimes she committed. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-doesnt-need-a-new-revolution-11593201840?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Outrage is the natural response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. Yet outrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand. An act of police brutality became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood. Protests spilled over into violence and looting. Stores were destroyed; policemen and civilians injured and killed. The truism “black lives matter” was joined by a senseless slogan: “Defund the police.”

Democratic politicians—and some Republicans—hastened to appease the protesters. The mayors of Los Angeles and New York pledged to cut their cities’ police budgets. The Minneapolis City Council said it intended to disband the police department. The speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats donned scarves made of Ghanaian Kente cloth and kneeled in the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney joined a march.

Corporate executives scrambled to identify their brands with the protests. By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-covid-chutzpah-11593212522?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Texas and Florida put their economic reopenings on pause Friday amid new coronavirus flare-ups, and you can almost feel the Schadenfreude rising from newsrooms and Democratic offices. Serves those Republican-run states right for opening so quickly!

The truth is that those states began reopening several weeks ago, and not all states that have reopened have had major outbreaks. The causes of the flare-ups are varied. Some may spread among young people ignoring social-distancing advice. Border counties in Texas have been especially hard hit, perhaps from cross-border migration from hard-hit Mexico. Houston had 60,000 people at the George Floyd funeral and demonstration three weeks ago, and masks weren’t ubiquitous.

The outbreaks are worrying, but the reopening was always going to require trial and error. Opening up bars to regular business may have been a mistake, and now Florida and Texas are shutting them down or limiting the number of patrons. The flare-ups should cause people to be more cautious, but they don’t justify the economic and public-health damage of strict new state-wide lockdowns.

As for chutzpah, the prize goes to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who reveled in the misery of others on Friday: “Oh, I say to them all, look at the numbers. You played politics with this virus and you lost. You told the people of your state and you told the people of this country, White House, ‘Don’t worry about it. Just open up, go about your business, this is all Democratic hyperbole.’ Oh, really? Now you see 27 states with the numbers going up. You see the death projections going up.”

https://www.dailysquib.co.uk/world/37607-u-s-criminals-solidly-endorse-defunding-police.html

A consortium of criminals have solidly endorsed the defunding of police forces of America, so that their criminal activities can be completed without any resistance or prosecution.

Speaking at the consortium, master safe breaker, Ernie Monkhouse, 43, from Chicago extolled the benefits of the police defunding:

“Usually breaking into a bank’s vault takes 15 minutes minimum before the pigs arrive. Now we can take our time and the Democrats say they will send a social worker and a mental health worker to talk us down. We either shoot them in the fuckin’ head, or tie ’em up in the vault, take the millions and walk out, free as birds!”

Attendees at the consortium included many organised crime syndicates who welcomed the defunding police forces.

“I know I’d rather have a cop with no gun coming at me on a beat up bicycle after our crew brutally robs a cash transit van than a shitload of armed cops in cars. Thank you Democrats, you certainly have our vote,” one gang member quipped.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/25/lincolns-new-assassins/

The fact that we have produced senseless mobs willing to tear down our monuments testifies to the fact that we, the living, need to do more to honor our nation’s living spirit, not merely take selfies before dead bronze.

Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.

According to noted Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight’s account of the statue’s creation, the sculptor, Thomas Ball, had altered his conception from a “‘kneeling slave . . . represented as perfectly passive’ (freedom given), to an ‘emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance’ (freedom seized), . . . the monument as an ‘ideal group . . . [was] converted into the literal truth of history.’” 

In other words, the Commission charged with coming up with an appropriate memorial and raising funds from freed slaves—yes, the mob would be desecrating the memories, labor, and donations of enslaved Americans—saw the potential problems in the design and persuaded the sculptor to alter the statue.

The model for the slave, Archer Alexander, was the last slave captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/philosophy-behind-our-culture-wars-and-advancing-jason-d-hill/

In my last article, “The Advancing Nihilism and the Rot of Post-Modernism in the West,” I submitted that the culture wars taking place in the streets and universities across the United States and parts of Europe were symptoms of a larger moral pandemic whose philosophic roots both spawned and legitimized anarchical impulses run amok. I pointed out that moral relativism advances the idea that there are no objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. Its ruling principle is subjectivism. What one feels is the truth constitutes the truth. Logic and reason, according to the more radical school of subjectivism, is the creation of racist and imperialist white constructs. But if nihilism is the logical concomitant of relativism, one must now ask: what is the school and the philosophical foundation of relativism? What first foundational principles underscore the relativism that gives rise to the nihilism in the streets and in our educational systems?

That school of thought is postmodernism. If you want to see the connection between calls for a decolonized syllabus and indiscriminate vandalism of all statues because they are simply representations of the past and representative of men of a racial orientation; if you want to see metaphysical rage directed aimlessly at the universe, anger directed at everyone but no one in particular, look no further than the school of postmodernism–a vicious anti-reason and, therefore, anti-life phenomenon that robs human beings of a particular method of cognition. It deprives them of integrating fundamental principles in order to offer clear and lucid thinking that leads to intelligible and reasonable actions. It cuts away at the idea of an objective reality and replaces it with an unbridled and amorphous, necrotic lump of feelings that are treated as tools of cognition. But these feelings are only the fears, prejudices and projections of chronically anxious people for whom truth is a death knell, as it emancipates them from their self-curated silos and forces them into a universe that cares only about facts, not feelings or wishful thinking.

Hence, hacking mindlessly at statues, “decolonizing syllabi,” and ridding educational courses of canonical dead white educators cannot magically bring about a new world order. And the perpetrators know it. So they resort to wanton destruction and nihilism. Ideas have consequences; and further, all actions, even nihilistic ones, are antecedently traceable back to some philosophical set of principles. Postmodern nihilism is the ruling school of thought guiding human actions today and destroying our civilization. Its ruling principles deserve to be elucidated and delineated clearly.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/amalek_israels_ancient_enemy_lives_among_us.html

In the annals of Jewish history, “[t]he Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation living near the land of Canaan. They were the first nation to attack the Jewish people after the Exodus from Egypt, and they are seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jews. The nation of Amalek is long gone, but they live on as the internal [and external] enemies that the Jewish people battle on a daily basis.” Amalek seeks Israel’s physical as well as spiritual annihilation.

Dear Reader — take a moment and substitute the word America for the word Israel, and you will begin to see the trajectory of this article.

At the dawn of the American Revolution, John Adams observed, “If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply, than to the sense of this difference?”

As Mark Alexander writes “[b]ut today, the ability of Americans to discern ‘between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice,’ is being systematically eroded by leftist politicos, in collusion with their 24/7 Left media and Big Tech enablers, relentlessly seeking to empower the state.”

Consequently, America is presently in a battle, not only for its physical well-being but also for its spiritual values.  In the world of media, for example, The Atlantic, endorses the “insane racism of Ta Nehisi Coates” while also hosting a film by Steve Jobs’ widow that blames Jews for all the Middle Eastern wars.  Even the world of sports is being corrupted.

https://spectator.us/great-self-hate-statues-roosevelt/

Only a society that sees a need for ‘self-esteem’ counseling could be so susceptible to such destructive illusions.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.  

The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, two years before he was sworn in as President. Poor Teddy. Once the very embodiment of American confidence and aspiration, he was just voted off the island (Manhattan in this case) by the board of trustees the American Museum of Natural History. A statue of Roosevelt, astride a horse and ‘flanked by a Native American man and an African man’, as the New York Times describes it, stands on a plinth in front of the museum. The museum’s board was offering preemptive surrender to the mob that has graduated from burning and looting to toppling statues and defacing monuments. Teddy Roosevelt, the closest America has ever come to genuine colonialist in the White House, was too tempting a target.  

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-link-between-george-orwell-george-floyd-and-the-jews-opinion-632825

Anybody who believes that the goal of the protesters has been to raise consciousness about the unfair treatment of blacks is missing the point and the bigger picture.

George Orwell’s iconic book 1984 depicts a dystopian post-revolutionary world in which an all-powerful “Party” rules a totalitarian universe through the use of “Thought Police.”

In Part Two of the prophetic novel, the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, tries to impress upon Julia, the woman with whom he is having a dangerous and forbidden love affair, why it is so impossible to rebel against mind control. “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?” he asks rhetorically, during one their trysts, while recounting tales of his time as a forger of records. “If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.”

He goes on, “Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

These words – published in Britain in 1949, four years after the end of World War II – are particularly chilling today, in light of the current upheaval in the US.

THE OSTENSIBLE catalyst for the explosion of what could be called the “cancel-culture revolution” was the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd by a sadistic Minneapolis police officer. The ground was already fertile for the mayhem that ensued, however.