RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/27/eric-hoffer-and-black-lives-matter/

Within the last month, events have propelled Black Lives Matter into a major cause, with a great deal of clout, both directly and indirectly. That influence and the anger it is associated with has also made it very risky for people to disagree with BLM even in limited ways, because of threats to objectors’ reputations, safety and livelihoods. That presents the public with a very biased conversation. As a result, perhaps only someone who has already passed on can safely air concerns.

There is one such person known for his insight into group movements – Eric Hoffer, who died in 1983. Known as the “longshoreman philosopher” for the manual labor he performed for most of his life, Hoffer wrote eleven books, beginning with 1951’s “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” which focused on the allure of a seemingly ennobling collective cause, and the coercive power which it puts in the hands of leaders and their discontented followers, in contrast with freedom, which is the only milieu in which creative individuals can flourish and find fulfillment.

Consider some of what the Presidential Medal of Freedom holder had to say about such causes:

The desire for freedom … says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities.

Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.

https://spectator.us/end-history-george-floyd-civilization/

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters:‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’

The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous. Political posturing is everywhere. At first it seems effete and merely silly; then it grows muscles and claws. The posturing now comes with bricks, baseball bats and Molotov cocktails. Grievances blur and lose their specificity. Every slight becomes a pretext for boundless rage. The ‘system’ — ordered liberty and the rule of law — is rudely shoved into the dustbin of history. Civility itself — the social compact that makes society possible — is tossed aside as an impediment to justice.

Is this the precipice upon which we now are perched? HBO has pulled the movie Gone With the Wind because the classic Civil War story is a ‘product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society’. And while you get your mind around that nugget of politically correct virtue signaling, note that Cops, a TV show that depicts the police in a positive light, is being summarily canceled ‘amid nationwide anti police protests after Mr Floyd’s killing’, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Nidra is my dear friend- a fascinating woman and brilliant writer….rsk

* Nidra Poller (Paris) https://youtu.be/wHky3gPi0oA

Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

                                                                                                     George Orwell                                                                                                                

Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”   

Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.

It’s all the rage right now for progressives and their allies to call anybody who doesn’t toe the party line of Black Live Matter a “racist,” or worse, a “white supremacist.” Even better is to hurl the accusation that the entire American country is “systemically racist.”

And yet, as I repeatedly note on this blog, all you need to do is look at a little data, and you quickly realize that the jurisdictions most firmly in progressive control and for the longest time — the solidly Democratic big cities with Democratic mayors, City Councils, Congresspersons, and state governors for decades on end — are the places that have the worst outcomes for their African American citizens on every metric you can find. Ask where in this country you can find the highest rates of poverty, the highest income inequality, the highest crime rates, the most murders, the most expensive housing, the worst housing shortages, the most homelessness, the highest energy costs, and so on and on — all of this impacting disproportionately on African Americans — and time after time the answer is, in the big Democrat-run cities.

But what does the dynamic that brings about these disastrous results look like on the ground? Certainly part of it is massive government “anti-poverty” bureaucracies that may have been well-intentioned at the outset, but in practice exist today only to fight to increase their staffs and budgets and never raise a single person out of poverty. But then there is also the perverse progressive mindset that demands special treatment for African Americans, somehow without realizing that that often inherently means treating African Americans as inferior..

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-room-where-it-happens-indeed/91173/

As the House readied its vote to make a new state out of the District of Columbia, the Speaker went before the press to dilate on injustice of what has obtained for the past 230 years. Mrs. Pelosi called the District “an affront to our democracy.” She noted that its residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and contribute to the “economic vitality” of America but lack for representation. “How could it be? Whose idea was that?”

It turns out that we know exactly whose idea it was. That’s because it was hatched at the very dinner party that, among other things, is now being immortalized anew in the Broadway blockbuster “Hamilton.” The dinner took place in 1790 at New York. It was no cabal of counter-revolutionary cads. The three persons in the room where it happened were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

Jefferson, then secretary of state, was the host. He had famously encountered Hamilton outside President Washington’s office at lower Manhattan. Hamilton, Jefferson later wrote, looked “somber, haggard, and dejected.” That was owing to Congress having just rejected his plan for the federal government to assume the states’ debts from the Revolutionary War. So Jefferson offered to host a dinner with Madison.

The repast took place on June 20. The deal they struck was that Madison would support Hamilton’s plan to federalize the debt, while Hamilton would agree to putting the American capital at a spot along the Potomac. By the end of July, the House and Senate had passed the legislation. They acted under the constitutional grant to Congress of the power to accept such a district as ceded to the federal government by the states.

And to exercise over it “exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever.” Madison, in 43 Federalist, addressed the logic of this. He called the Congress’ “complete authority at the seat of government” an “indispensable necessity.” Without it, he reckoned, “public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity.” Plus members of the government might develop a “dependence” on the local state.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24330/face-masks-the-radical-leftist-symbol : http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

: http://lindagoudsmit.com

Masks have been a part of societies for 9,000 years. The earliest masks were used for rituals and ceremonies. Later, they were used in hunting, feasts, wars, performances, theaters, fashion, sports, movies, and then as protection against medical and occupational hazards. Masks have become symbols for their various functions. 

Different masks worn by different people have different motives. A masked bank robber is very different from a masked Halloween trick-or-treater. Masks are coverings that can also disguise messages. So it is with political masks.  

The two most controversial political masks in America today are the Muslim niqab and the COVID19 face mask. What do these seemingly disparate face coverings have in common? Both are marketed as protective face coverings with the connotation of safety, both are worn with pride by their adherents, and both disguise a powerful political message of submission. The mask is the message.

Muslim women following supremacist, Islamic religious sharia law are subservient to their fathers, husbands, and brothers no matter where they live in the world, and no matter how protective equal rights laws for women are in the country where they reside. Sharia law does not recognize the authority of the United States Constitution. 

Muslim women who embrace sharia law wear their niqabs with pride. They value their submission and, for them, wearing the face-covering is virtue signaling. For most Americans, the face mask worn by Muslim women is a detestable symbol of submission that violates American principles of equality and freedom. It is almost incomprehensible for Americans to understand these Muslim women without understanding that sharia law teaches the supremacy of Islam. 

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.