RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Left-wing thinking effectively blanks out the real distinctions between representative government and totalitarian dictatorship.

–       Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

There is a growing consensus among conservative writers and many individual citizens that America has descended into a condition of virtual civil war. It is not, or not yet, characterized by military confrontations on a national scale, as in 1861-65, but the facts on the ground strongly suggest a breakdown of civil order:

·       the irreconcilable conflict between the political left and right;

·       the belligerence and vituperation that passes for a national “conversation”;

·       sporadic acts of violence, flash mobs and organized riots erupting in every corner of the country;

·       the dismal lack of local and state leadership;

·       Orwellian Ministries of Truth, otherwise known as digital platforms, controlling and censoring information;

·       a rabid feminist network intent on destabilizing cultural traditions and mores;

·       a president betrayed by his own generals and party senators;

·       a rogue enclave set up by malcontents and domestic terrorists in the middle of an American city;

·       and racial mayhem fomented and exploited by a class of partisan criminals.

Whether or not we call this situation the preliminary stages of civil war or simply massive social unrest and cutthroat politics may be only a matter of terminology.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2020/06/19/the-silent-majority-can-be-silent-no-more-n551984

Lately, it seems that we conservatives can’t win even when we’re winning. But the country is under siege, so we cannot indulge in the luxury of being discouraged.

This year has been one body blow after another to the nation we love. First, there was the coronavirus, and we thought, “How can this get any worse?” Then came the economic shutdown and the incalculable pain and suffering it brought. Next were the riots, the radicals’ unopposed seizure of a section of Seattle, and the maniacal efforts throughout the country to defund the police. Now a series of rulings from the “conservative” Supreme Court is wreaking untold havoc on the Constitution and the rule of law.

It wouldn’t take a Christian fanatic or an excitable conspiracist to conclude that America is now the target of an intense spiritual onslaught — brought on by its own rampant descent into decadence.

The left has been at war with America as founded for decades, and it has made great progress in transforming our culture and institutions. Leftists are activism-oriented and relentless. They pursue their goals 24/7, exhausting their less activist and less calculating opponents, and advance their agenda by sheer attrition.

But a more important factor in the left’s success is the depressing naivete of too many conservatives about its ultimate aims. If you underestimate the extremism and determination of your opponents, how can you counter them?

Perhaps one silver lining emerging from the Democrats’ enabling of the proliferating lawlessness in America is that unsuspecting patriots are finally awakening to the horrors facing us and the left’s cynical exploitation of them.

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

“His Majesty King Mob might not yet control the streets, but he certainly controls the thinking of Americans who are mired as much in their guilt as in their stupidity.”

The men who pulled Reginald Denny from his truck during the Rodney King riots and beat him to a pulp had no idea who Rodney King was. They just wanted the truck.

Many of the men who stormed the Winter Palace with firearms had not a scintilla of an idea what communism was.

His Majesty King Mob had a variety of motivations for being in the streets, both in 1780 and in the 1960s, few of them good. Many of the marauders were politically no more sophisticated than a British soccer fan seeking his “agro” by breaking heads.

Venerating the mob or yielding to their occupation — as in Seattle — only gives them legitimacy, as does the pandering of Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, draped in culturally appropriated kente cloth.

The one aspect of riots that few want to talk about is how the proper application of force will extinguish the mob in short order.

As the military historian D. J. Goodspeed has observed, no mob, no revolt, no group of conspirators ever succeeded in overthrowing the social-political order if even a single military company was willing to judiciously use force against it.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24290/political-predators-threaten-america-with
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

A predator is defined as an animal that naturally preys on others. Predation is a natural and accepted fact of life in the wild animal kingdom – eat or be eaten is a matter of survival. 

A predator is also defined as a person or group that ruthlessly exploits others. Predation is an unacceptable fact of life in the civilized world of ordered liberty and mutuality where predation is a matter of domination, not survival. 

Sexual predators live in this group. Sexual assaults, including rape and childhood sexual abuse, are crimes of power, dominance, and submission. Political predators are a variation on the same theme of power. Like sexual predators, political predators commit crimes of dominance and submission against unsuspecting members of society. This is how it works.

Political predators disguise their motives. No stranger ever seduced a child with spinach. Marxist political predators have been seducing American children with leftist anti-American indoctrination in public schools since 1979 when Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education. Political predators launched their Culture War war on America with a disinformation campaign promising social justice and income equality that begins in kindergarten.

Barack Obama, political predator-in-chief, escalated the propaganda campaign against American children with Common Core and its anti-American leftist narrative of moral relativism, historical revisionism, and political correctness. During his seditious two terms, Obama aligned himself with the equally anti-American Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. 

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Civilization moves inexorably forward. Over centuries, more and more people have enjoyed the freedom that democratic forms of government offer, and the fruits that industrial and technological advancements and free market capitalism provide. But bumps and potholes inhibit progress. The United States (and the western world) must not allow the disruptions by a few to impede the rights of the many. In the midst of chaos, we ask: Is anybody in charge?

Reminiscent of the takeover of deans’ offices in 1968, college students at UCLA, already granted safe spaces where they are protected from white-privileged professors and students, demand a “no-harm” grading system, shorter exams and extended deadlines for Black students. As a form of virtue signaling, corporations empower activists, in hopes of reducing the threat of litigation. The New York Times, at the instigation of the staff, fired James Bennet, a white, male editor for publishing a Republican Senator’s op-ed. A headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Buildings Matter, Too,” led to the resignation of a top editor. In a dozen and more cities, like New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Des Moines protests turned into riots, and looters took to the streets, burning cars, smashing windows and robbing stores. Police stepped aside and knelt in obeisance to protesters.

Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle has allowed a vigilante group to take over six blocks in the residential area of Capital Hill, which includes a police station, as an autonomous zone (CHAZ). They patrol its border with weapons, demand rent control and reverse gentrification. They want to abolish the police force and receive free healthcare, and they want the release of all those imprisoned on marijuana charges. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, mobs have defaced and destroyed statues across the country. While their preferred targets are Southern Civil War Generals, they have been indiscriminate in their targets. In Los Angeles, a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Jews during World War II was marred with irrelevant slogans: “BLM” and “Free Palestine.” In Washington, D.C., vandals defaced the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial. World War I American doughboy statues in Birmingham, Alabama and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania were vandalized. The Sacred Heart of Jesus statue at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Wasco, California had its head ripped off.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-new-norm.html

“Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.”

As I have queried elsewhere: Will Americans reclaim their freedom to go about their lives without the government or the “experts” on the virus “crisis” dictating how they must conduct  their lives, as they had decades ago? Do they even remember the time?  I’ve said it before: This is not my culture, and it seems to be becoming worse;  statists have jumped at the opportunity to impose more and more restrictions and controls, and proclaim that they are the “new norm.”.

One blog offered this advice on how to submit: 

“You can start over again! Don’t even think about quitting now! It is easy to replay in your mind how things did not work, how much you lost, what you are going through, how angry you are. There is no amount of conversation or magic that is going to wipe the slate clean. You are wasting valuable time and energy that could be used to regain a new normal and start another version of your life. Even though you are hurt and you may be feeling down — stop kicking yourself! Face what has happened. Make the decision to start over again.”

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.