RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/advancing-nihilism-and-rot-post-modernism-west-jason-d-hill/

Much has already been written on the horrific and tragic killing of George Floyd, and much has been written and debated about the existence or non-existence of systemic racism in our society and in the police departments of the United States of America. I submit that reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements about that issue; they can offer reasonable counterfactuals and equally compelling rejoinders. I am a philosopher by training, and one possessed of a cold, unsentimental mind by temperament. Therefore, I take it that an absence of a consensus about issues that are far from unassailable truths can exist without civic life and social trust and cohesion falling into total disarray. 

What bothers me about the culture wars taking place in the streets of American cities as I listen (not unsympathetically to the cries of the hearts of people who have genuinely suffered from prejudice and brutality in their lives) is a number of things. First and foremost is the unchanneled rage and directionless anger that is harming not just innocent citizens of all races, but also the very people in whose names the protests and riots are offered up as a form of both restorative and retributive justice, and as invisible victims in systemically corrupt institutions: black people.

When black and white protestors indiscriminately tear down or deface the statues of slaves traders and white abolitionists with equal abandon; when Winston Churchill, a gallant war hero and indisputable defender of Western civilization who, along with the United States, saved the West from the rapacious ravages of Hitler’s expansionist design for racially-dominated Aryan rule, is considered morally indistinguishable from racial separatists; and when the latter are lumped with white abolitionists who gave their lives for black emancipation, there is no lower place to sink in terms of both cognitive dissonance and moral depravity. In an imperfect world, moral and conceptual distinctions must be made. In London, the statue of Abraham Lincoln was vandalized at a Black Lives Matter protest.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/why-we-wont-have-civil-war-bruce-thornton/

The latest take on the recent riots and protests is that our political “cold” civil war is turning hot. The political polarization of recent years is now turning increasingly violent, with each side hunkering in its hardened silos and elevating the threat-level to DEFCON 1. The coronavirus and its attendant hysteria have increased this sense of dread and apocalyptic angst. That’s why, the pundits tell us, we the people are “yearning for normal,” a longing that will help determine the outcome of the presidential election.

This fear is overblown. We’re mistaking an availability error––the fallacy of coming to conclusions based on what is most recent and first comes to mind––for a more probable reality. But that doesn’t mean that we are not facing serious political danger in the coming months.

There are several reasons why a civil war is unlikely. First, we live in a world saturated with news and images 24/7, skewing our sense of reality. Moreover, information is refreshed in seconds and accompanied by dramatic visuals. Way back in 1962 Daniel Boorstin was decrying how the image became the reality, or what he called “pseudo-events,” a “thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.” That world of images has become the world, crowding out all the other real data and events that define our daily existence. In such a world it’s easy to jump to improbable conclusions.

And images love the drama of conflict and violence. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as the television newsroom cliché puts it. Additionally, these images typically lack a larger context. They are framed, often intentionally, to heighten the emotional drama at the expense of accurate understanding. Such events are perfect for creating the “propaganda of the deed,” as the old anarchists put it, the promotion of political ideology through emotionally charged, usually violent images. So powerful are these images that they can create a seeming reality.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/17/when-will-we-stand-up-to-the-tyrants-of-woke-conformity/

Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.

But it will never be enough. Apologies and appeasement only encourage the bullies. The Woke mob never sleeps. It lives to cancel the lives of others. We are warned: Conform or else.

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But on Monday, the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that undergirds the movement:

Mike Gundy cannot remain the OK State head coach. Too influential of a position in society. Fire him, unless he agrees to get extensive psychological help.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-editors/refusing-mob-rule-defending-american-values/

Across the United States, a great unraveling is in progress. A rolling crime wave, under the guise of social activism, has left city after American city shattered and smoldering. Armed anarchists seized territory inside Seattle with the blessing of local government. In Minneapolis and other cities, a campaign to enfeeble or eliminate the police has gained full legitimacy. In Kentucky, the governor has vowed to provide free health care only to one racial group. In the private sector, companies such as Uber Eats have pledged their commitment to a policy of race-conscious discrimination as well. And major media organs sanction all of the above as proper and good.

The unraveling goes further still. Social-justice mobs have taken aim at freedom of expression, inventing new heresies daily and ruining the lives of those who unwittingly give voice to them. Forced confessions and language proscriptions are the order of the day. Poetry, fiction, movies, and television shows—including children’s cartoons—are canceled and excised from history. Indeed, all art and opinion are now subject to the chopping block lest they prove insufficiently propagandistic.

To rewrite the present, the mob has rewritten the past. They have forced upon us a distorted and grotesque version of American history. With the support of corporations and education boards, school textbooks and curricula tell of an unredeemable America founded not on the promise of human liberty but human bondage. What’s more, this history discounts the transformative progress on racial equality for which Americans—black and white—have given their lives.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/18/americans-should-never-again-comply-with-pandemic-lockdown-orders/

By treating Black Lives Matters protests differently than other large gatherings, public officials and health experts have exposed themselves as hypocrites.

We’re told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We’ve heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.

What these experts and officials don’t seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown orders again. They have burned their credibility to the ground, and they no longer have the moral authority to tell us what to do.

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay.

The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/how-cultural-revolutions-die-or-not/#slide-1

They eat their own, unless a cruel dictator rises to unite and control the mob.

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”

Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

Moammar Qaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once, as Baltimore’s mayor, dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?

If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.

Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after men whom protestors now deem racists.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/blm-movement-existential-threat-america-dr-craig-luther/

Craig Luther completed his Ph.D. in Modern European History at UC Santa Barbara. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, retired U.S. Air Force historian, and author of 8 books on the Second World War focusing on German military operations on the eastern front.

BLACK LIVES MATTER has taken America by storm. Simply put, it is a radical Leftist outfit that seeks to replace capitalism with socialism, abolish the police (and let criminals out of jail), and looks to socialist Venezuela as a model. Historically, BLM’s antecedents reach back to the Black Panthers of the 1960s; in recent years it has drawn inspiration from the radical Occupy Wall Street movement.

The BLM movement was given added impetus by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Left mobilized upon Brown’s tragic death in 2014, BLM and other radical groups promoting the false narrative of “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”–supposedly the young man’s final words before he was, we were told, brutally gunned down by a racist white cop. Destructive and deadly riots ensued.

Of course, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” was One. Big. Lie. Every black witness who testified before the grand jury stated that Michael Brown had attempted to force his way into the officer’s police cruiser, assaulted the officer, and tried to grab his weapon. Looked at objectively, Mr Brown was a thug who, sadly, paid with his life for the terrible choices he made; even the Obama justice department could not come to a different conclusion.

https://dianebederman.com/black-lives-matter-the-black-hebrew-israelites-ice-cube-farrakhan-and-the-pogroms-of-2020/

So here we are in the year 2020 and we have Black Lives Matter with BDS, which has once again used age-old tropes of experiencing “settler-colonialism” and “apartheid” in “Israel’s regime of oppression” to try to connect their plight with those of the African-American communities, using the murder of George Floyd and many other deaths of black Americans to push anti-Semitic ideals.

And then along comes the Hebrew Black Israelites.  Another “religion” coming from a line of religions trying to replace or supersede Judaism with Christianity. So now we have these recently created or resurrected, depending on your worldview “Jews,” replacing Jews.

So who are these people?

There are many sects which refer to themselves with variations of the name Black Hebrew Israelites.

Some, but not all, are outspoken anti-Semites and racists. It should be emphasized that the extremist and anti-Semitic sects of Black Hebrew Israelites are unrelated to the thousands of black Jews and other Jews of color in the US, who are genuine members of the Jewish faith. Furthermore, they should not be confused with Ethiopian Jews who mostly live in Israel today.  Anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelites assert that white people are agents of Satan, Jews are liars and false worshipers of God, and blacks are the true “chosen people” and are racially superior to other ethnicities.

Another sect of Black Hebrew Israelites is Israel United In Christ, a New York-based group with a national and international presence as well, including in Newark, NJ. The leader of the group is Nathaniel Ray (aka Bishop Nathanyel Ben Israel).  The group’s mission is to spread the Black Hebrew Israelite ideology and to educate black individuals of their true place in society. They are committed to spreading the ideology globally and recruiting as many black individuals as possible. They rely heavily on social media to promote their beliefs, as well as hosting public activities such as marches and Bible readings.  They reject Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, specifically calling Jews “the bastards that funded the slave trade.” They blame Jews and other ethnicities for all social ills plaguing black individuals, and claim that acceptance of this ideology and God will free black people. Further, they assert that Jews and white people worship the devil, and white people will become their slaves in Heaven.

https://quillette.com/2020/06/16/seattles-summer-of-love/

The bluest skies you’ve ever seen in Seattle ,And the hills the greenest green in Seattle, Like a beautiful child growing up free and wild, Full of hopes and full of fears, Full of laughter full of tears,Full of dreams to last the years in Seattle, In Seattle

So Perry Como sang in the late ’60s. Now it seems the days of beautiful children growing up free and wild are returning to Seattle. Like other American cities over the last three weeks, Seattle saw protests rapidly become violent clashes with police. This ugliness waxed and waned for a fortnight until police withdrew from their East Precinct Building, effectively ceding the surrounding area to the protestors. Barriers were erected around it by activists who initially christened the new territory the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), and later renamed it the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). As their quasi-manifesto of June 9th put it, they had “liberated Free Capitol Hill in the name of the people of Seattle.”

Now a tense and potentially dangerous stand-off has developed. What does the city administration intend to do? On June 11th, the Democratic mayor of the city, Jennifer Durkan, was interviewed on CNN by a sympathetic Chris Cuomo. Cuomo began by asking if Durkan had lost control of her own city’s streets.

Durkan: We’ve got four blocks in Seattle that you just saw pictures of that is more like a block party atmosphere. It’s not an armed takeover, it’s not a military junta. We will make sure that we can restore this. But we have block parties and the like in this part of Seattle all the time… There is no threat right now to the public and we’re looking, we’re taking that very seriously, we’re meeting with businesses and residents…

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/17/when-will-we-stand-up-to-the-tyrants-of-woke-conformity/

Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.

But it will never be enough. Apologies and appeasement only encourage the bullies. The Woke mob never sleeps. It lives to cancel the lives of others. We are warned: Conform or else.

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But on Monday, the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that undergirds the movement:

Mike Gundy cannot remain the OK State head coach. Too influential of a position in society. Fire him, unless he agrees to get extensive psychological help.

It’s time we acknowledge that conservatism isn’t just some political view. It means you’re the very bottom rung of society, dangerous and deranged. Some conservatives are trying to become better people. Great. But people who flaunt their conservatism are psychotic.