RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/statues-and-limitations/

Spasmodic attempts to remake the world invariably involve the throwing out of the good along with the bad. Our ongoing bout of statuary iconoclasm has proven no exception.

The list of figures whose likenesses have been defaced now includes Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Cervantes, Robert the Bruce, Voltaire, General Schuyler, the abolitionist Mathias Baldwin, and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. One can only imagine the philosophy that could draw a line around as motley a crew as that.

Of course, no such philosophy exists — and nor will it. Rather, we find ourselves in the middle stages of a cultural riot in which everything — and everyone — has become fair game. What do Cervantes and Stevie Ray Vaughan have in common? Well, that they are both made of bronze, and are thus liable to make a sickening thud when pulled by force from their pedestals. The violence, to borrow a fashionable phrase, is the point.

But it is not acceptable. Irrespective of the nature of their grievance — or of the strength of the feeling undergirding it — violent mobs can’t make decisions on behalf of everyone else.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-dont-matter-to-black-lives-matter_3397428.html#

In case you missed it, and you could have considering the endless thumb sucking regarding just how many came or didn’t to the Trump rally in Tulsa, 60 were shot, 9 fatally, at last count, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago.

These included a 13-year old girl in the Austin neighborhood of the West Side, Two hours earlier, in the same area, someone pulled up alongside a Blue Honda in an SUV and fired several rounds at the driver, striking and killing his three-year old son.

Similar carnage occurred in Chi-town only a couple of weeks before over Memorial Day weekend when 39 were wounded and 10 died, including a 16-year old boy.

And then of course we have Minneapolis, where most of the recent contretemps began, where last night 1 died and 11 were wounded in a shooting spree.

All of this was black on black violence of the most tragic sort.

Where was Black Lives Matter? Nowhere to be found, since the cops didn’t do any of it. BLM doesn’t seem to care about violence done to blacks if the police are not involved, even though black on black is by many multiples more lethal and more common, resulting in exponentially more black casualties.

BLM’s primary interest appears to be smashing the state, creating revolution with their pals in Antifa in order to take power themselves.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-with-all-thy-faults/91170/

President Trump no doubt speaks for millions of New Yorkers and other Americans when he protests the decision to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the Museum of Natural History. He calls the decision “ridiculous.” There are serious differing views. Ours is that it’s a sad day for those who thrill to the spirit of liberalism in our city and the inclusive Americanism for which Roosevelt stood during his heroic life.

The museum is trying to cast its decision as being animated by something other than disapproval for Roosevelt himself. The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, is insisting to the Times that its decision to remove the monument “is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition that’s depicted in it.” She is referring to the Native American man and African man on either side of TR and the steed on which he is mounted.

We, for one, find that distinction unconvincing, even if art is in the eye of the beholder. The protesters who forced the museum’s hand hate Roosevelt as much as his statue. The sculptor himself, James Earle Fraser, intended the two figures beside TR to symbolize “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.” Roosevelt mightn’t pass muster with today’s protesters, but in his own time, he was a progressive.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/22/john-bolton-is-the-perfect-washington-man/

Bolton is a thin-skinned and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike.

In the good old days of the internet blogosphere, there was a running bit at Jeff Goldstein’s blog Protein Wisdom which provided a name for John Bolton’s prominent mustache – “Regis”, a globe-trotting nuke-loving Hamas-bashing sexually aggressive bon-vivant with lush whiskey-tinged follicles. The image is ridiculous of course, but it is not far from the image the real John Bolton paints of himself in the absurdly entertaining pages of his book, the inaptly named The Room Where It Happened.

First, let me say that I love this book. I love everything about it. It is true unadulterated fan-fic for Bolton lovers everywhere. He is always right. He is always noble. His purposes are always true. Anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot, or possibly worse. Edward from Twilight has more flaws than this iteration of John Bolton, the mustachioed hero who can do no wrong… except to be, at a critical moment, surrounded entirely by idiots.

If you don’t believe me, just read the reviews from others who have welcomed most if not all of the quite profitable books by insiders excoriating the president released in the past several years.

From The New York Times review:

Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies … The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged … When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part—a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often.

From The New Yorker review:

Bolton mocks, disparages, or clashes with Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and others, all within the book’s first hundred pages. By the end of the nearly five-hundred-page book, Bolton also criticizes Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, the entire White House economic team, many of his foreign counterparts, and, although he shares their misgivings about Donald Trump, the House Democrats who impeached the President.

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

A good friend of mine who fled the Soviet Union many years ago recently sent me a most chilling interview on You Tube.  Under ten minutes long, it needs to be seen by every American who wonders why the country is unraveling before our very eyes.  The interview features Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB spy and state media propagandist who defected to Canada in 1970.  Bezmenov cogently explains how “ideological subversion” is an essential method used by communists to undermine and destabilize Western countries.  His explanation crystallizes so much of what has happened in America in the last 40 years. 

Basically there are four steps to ideological subversion or “changing the perspective of reality” — in other words a mass brainwashing.  The first step is known as demoralization and it takes 15-20 years — the span of time needed to educate one generation by exposing them to the “ideology of the enemy.”  In America we have had

Marxist-Leninist ideology pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (patriotism).

And it makes not a whit of difference if these students are exposed to true information because “a person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.”  Their minds are cemented.  Total denial is in force.  Does this not explain why statues are being destroyed and America is continually depicted as a racist country when, in fact, it is not?

In fact, it would take another few generations to change the “tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.”

The second step in ideological subversion is destabilization. This step can be accomplished in as little as five years and the focus is on “destabilizing sectors such as the economy, law enforcement, foreign relations, media, and defense systems.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-truth-rationalism-religion

When I think of the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, I am moved by romantic nostalgia. By that I only mean that when I think of the Waverly I feel, in some way, what it was like to be young and in the rush of the conversation. The conversation was everything. It flowed all around us, in the subways and the streets, in the diners and the high-rise apartments, and if you could master it, it could take you anywhere. You could still smoke inside of diners back then and sometimes we spent whole days around an ashtray and a plate of disco fries, getting refills on the coffee. I’m not saying all the arguments were good, but sometimes it was thrilling.

Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too; the diner-booth yapper animated by argument, one version of the big city fast talker who reflected an aspect of the national character right there alongside the taciturn cowboy, the trapper frontiersman, and the Puritan. American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

http://carolineglick.com/john-boltons-temper-tantrum/

Former US national security adviser John Bolton’s critics routinely refer to him as a neoconservative. But they are wrong. Bolton was never part of the neoconservative clique of Bush administration officials.

Neoconservatives are messianists and American imperialism is their replacement theology.

Neoconservatives view America as the Promised Land and Americans as the Chosen People. From their perspective, the Torah was superseded by the Declaration of Independence. The Torah will not go forth from Zion, but from Washington, and the world will reach a redemptive state – what Jews refer to as “Tikkun Olam” not when the nations of the world accept God’s reign, but when the American empire brings democracy to all corners of the world.

Bolton, like President Donald Trump, disdains messianism. Like President Trump, his view of foreign policy is cut and dry. America is the good guy. It has enemies and allies. It is supposed to be good to its allies and bad to its enemies so that the people will want to be its allies and won’t want to be its enemies.

When Bolton ran a quixotic campaign in the Republican presidential primaries in 2012, many of his supporters hoped that at a minimum his run would help to position him as the Republican Party’s national security standard-bearer. And when President Trump appointed Bolton to serve as his national security adviser in 2018, many were certain that working together, the two men would take America’s superpower stature to new heights.

Alas, the two men’s common sense of the general thrust of US national security policy did not translate into a good working relationship. And truth be told, the person most responsible for their inability to work together was Bolton, not Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/21/what-happens-when-the-madness-ends/

When something cannot go on, it certainly will not go on. But what are the symptoms of what cannot go on and when? 

There are two historic red lines and our revolution is getting close to both. 

When Normal People Grow Weary 

One is when “average” people, both white and nonwhite, who identify neither with Left nor Right, woke nor unwoke, become frightened or appalled by the violence and the anarchy—and thus finally move to dismantle the guillotine as the razor increasingly starts haircutting friends, idols, and compatriots. 

Their verdict can be known either by demonstrating themselves, boycotting, voting, or massive civil disobedience. At some point, tonight’s hero on YouTube torching Wendy’s or kicking a downed policeman on CNN, becomes tomorrow’s commonplace, unnoticed felon—with a new warrant issued out on his head, and about whose fate and lengthy CV no one other than his parents much cares.

Governors and mayors can demand masks and all sorts of social distancing measures. But once they declared that only those not demonstrating—the non-looting and nonviolent—were subject to their rules, while millions both peacefully protesting and violently looting were exempt, then their words meant nothing. It will be impossible for them ever to be seen as credible again. Virus or no virus, crowded freeways, and busy malls will soon be referenda on the bond of governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. 

In a few weeks, we are promised that multimillionaire NFL players and coaches in unison will not deign to stand up for the National Anthem. Promises, promises. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/nazi-us-comparisons-moral-obscenity-jay-bergman/

Comparisons of the United States and Nazi Germany have a long pedigree, from the “fascist” New Deal in the 1930s to “(George W.) Bush-Hitler” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

More recently, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, claimed in The Atlantic that, in their “apocalyptic thinking,” U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and other members of President Trump’s administration are contemporary equivalents of the Nazi collaborators in charge of Vichy France, the puppet regime the Nazis established during World War II that assisted in the Holocaust, and some of whose leaders later were executed as traitors.

Now, revived by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the comparison again is in the public domain.

But any analogy or comparison between the Nazi and American systems is invalid. A factual basis for it does not exist.

This certainly is true for the Floyd killing itself. By no rational standard of comparison can the actions of the Minneapolis police officers be characterized, as they recently were by Central Connecticut State University professor Aram Ayalon, as “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.” Nor can the indignation these same actions induced in Rep. Eric Swallwell, D-Calif., justify Swallwell’s subsequent description of Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany in the Trump administration, as “Goebbels with a Twitter account.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-agents-and-instruments-of-decadence/

“Given the academic poison that has permeated and rotted so much in schools and universities in recent years, the waves of protesters parading their ignorance on our streets as hard-core revolutionaries smash windows and defile statues is no surprise. Far more shocking would be the existence of elected officials prepared to cry ‘Enough!'”

Right now, all around the world, people’s lives and livelihoods continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are young and healthy, the Wuhan flu’s impact is generally mild and recovery almost certain, the casualty numbers confirming it is the elderly and those already suffering from other medical conditions for whom it is a deadly threat. It is, however, highly contagious, and it is this characteristic, together with the modern revolution in globe-girdling travel, that has led to its rapid spread around the world — a spread driven first through Chinese deceit abetted by World Health Organisation’s connivance and subsequently boosted by incompetently administered, or non-existent, national border controls.

Recent events have brought to light another contagion, this one let loose by the killing of George Floyd  beneath the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25. It spread rapidly — virally, as they say — around the world, thanks to the internet and revolution in communications.  That the circumstances in Minneapolis don’t necessarily apply elsewhere remains of no account. Facts don’t matter. Floyd’s death has been a pretext, the stated concern largely fraudulent, for blacks murdered by other blacks are of little concern and whites killed by blacks not worth mentioning at all.  The demonstrators believe social distancing rules are for others, not themselves.

Apart from the enjoyment of looting and destruction, what those in the rampaging crowds who actually have a serious social intent are really campaigning for is the destruction of Western civilisation, which they regard as primarily responsible for every evil known to man – racism, oppression, exploitation, misogyny, sexism, slavery, ‘catastrophic’ climate change. The list is endless. They believe that only by destruction  can  a new era of peace and enlightenment come about. Taking their cues from the French and Cambodian revolutions, they seek a societal re-set, starting from a new Year Zero.  Monuments must be destroyed, places and institutions renamed, books burned, films and TV programmes banned, historical figures forever condemned, history itself rewritten, anyone not fully with the programme “de-platformed” and a new power structure implemented.  It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 in which the  all-powerful Party understands that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The rioters are not just ignorant vandals; they are following an ideology, a venomous cult every bit as insane as that promoted by Mao Zedong which led to the trashing of Chinese history and culture by the Red Guards in 1966. In contrast to COVID-19, this contagion most seriously afflicts the young rather than the old and experienced.  It is a virus of the mind.