RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/21/liberty-justice-and-peace-on-earth/

Years ago, while demonstrating to support or oppose some very important cause I’ve long since forgotten, I committed an unpardonable sin. I accidentally paid attention to what we were chanting. 

“No Justice, No Peace!” we repeated, waving signs and banners confirming that we were adamant.

It felt good. Why should the unjust enjoy a moment’s peace? Why shouldn’t they suffer as incessantly as their victims? Could anyone stand against us? Would those we were protesting really say: “Yes, yes. We’ve done unspeakable things to benefit ourselves at the expense of others. But we’ve already won. Now run along home and let us enjoy our illicit victories?” 

Of course not. The righteousness of our position was unassailable. How could we lose?

We couldn’t. Until, that is, I took that moment to think. In that fleeting moment, I realized that our glorious chant had things exactly backward. In the pantheon of virtues, there may be no greater enemies than justice and peace.

Justice requires full compensation for all prior misdeeds. Justice makes victims whole. Justice assigns perpetrators penalties sufficient to ensure that none would even consider imitating their actions. Justice cannot prevail until every grievance has been addressed, adjudicated, and repaired. Justice looks backward to fix the past. 

Peace looks forward. Peace is always about hope for the future. There is a reason the phrase “you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends” has arisen everywhere, from Gaza to “Game of Thrones.” For war to give way to peace, all parties must relinquish past grievances. 

Peace requires accepting that the past cannot be fixed. Peace elevates future potential gains above justice for past acts. 

“No justice, no peace” has it all wrong. The choices are either “war until justice” or peace that recognizes some injustices cannot be fixed. 

That’s a bitter pill because justice and peace are both virtues. Every decent person, society, and moral code should value both. Yet no society can have both. Tradeoffs are always necessary—and many will always find such tradeoffs unacceptable.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/21/too-much-to-hope/

It’s time to quote André Gide again: “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” “All things are said already, but since no one is listening, it is always necessary to start again.” 

You already know everything I am going to talk about today: our two-tier, double-standard society, exemplified by the very different ways Donald Trump and Joe Biden are treated by the media and our Staatspolizei (a.k.a. the FBI) for “mishandling” and/or possessing classified documents; the minatory surrealism of Davos, where our would-be masters congregate to impress themselves and consort with prostitutes; the on-going January 6 “insurrection” fiasco which continues to sweep up and ruin the lives of ordinary Americans.

Regular readers know I was not optimistic about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his little band of Republicans who now run the House. How often have we had Republicans take office promising to cut spending, limit government overreach, and root out corruption and self-dealing, only to deliver . . . why, the same old thing! More spending, more government in your life, more, if sometimes newly diverted, corruption. It’s what politicians do. 

All that is inscribed in the DNA of those who seek, and therefore usually do not deserve, political power. It’s why James Madison and other founders went to such lengths to limit the size and the power of government. They understood that men are not “angels,” as Madison wrote, and therefore need to be constrained, as does government. It is also why politicians of both parties are happy to quote Madison just so long as his message is studiously neglected. 

Did you know that the federal debt now tops $31 trillion? You probably heard that while you were scrambling eggs ($8 a dozen where I live) on your gas stove (enjoy that while you can). Like me, you probably shrug your shoulders at such an incomprehensibly large number. As it happens, the last time the federal debt was under $1 trillion was in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was president. It’s gone up every single year since then. As the economist Herbert Stein famously remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Can this fiscal incontinence go on forever? Why don’t the people we elect to represent our interests, you know, represent our interests? Asking for a friend.

https://mailchi.mp/aa0a8501f26f/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59495?e=f8586430d6

California Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, are the dream team. He’s the governor and she’s the founder of a “gender justice” nonprofit that creates films and curricula for schools.

The Newsoms are going to change the world.

So, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com dug deep. What did we find?

Radical ideologies — funded by taxpayers.

And 2.6 million students in 11,200 classrooms in 5,000 schools across all 50 states have (so far) been subjected to Newsom’s films and curriculum. 

READ OUR INVESTIGATION: NEWSOM TWOSOME: SIEBEL NEWSOM’S FILMS – SHOWN IN MIDDLE SCHOOLS – FEATURE PORN, RADICALGENDER IDEALOGIES, AND HER HUSBAND GAVIN

Already, our report has been covered by FOX News, Yahoo! News, BizPac Review, and more…

https://nypost.com/2023/01/19/more-new-yorkers-moved-to-florida-in-2022-than-any-year-in-history/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=twitter_app

Dazed and abused by high taxes and rising crime, more New Yorkers fled to Florida in 2022 than any year in history, according to new data.

A staggering 64,577 Empire Staters exchanged their driver’s licenses for the Sunshine State version last year, according to figures from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

“They come in every day,” a staffer at a Jacksonville DMV office told The Post this week with a weary laugh. “I hear all the complaints. I feel like a therapist sometimes.”

The worker said the venting refugees harbor a long list of grievances — with taxes and eroding quality of life at the top of the list.

“It’s slowed down a little bit,” she said of the stampede. “But not by a whole lot, I can tell you that.”

There were 64,577 New Yorkers who exchanged their driver’s licenses for the Sunshine State version last year.

Last year’s record-shattering number comfortably eclipsed the prior mark of 61,728 New Yorkers who made the Florida switch in 2021, according to the data.

Fashion designer Alvin Valley, who moved his main residence to Palm Beach, previously told The Post that the demographics of those moving south has expanded in recent years.

“First it was the billionaires,” he said. “Then it was the rich following behind them. Now you have the middle class.”

The license transfer metric is considered a reliable indicator of migration patterns as it suggests a lasting decision to relocate.

https://www.city-journal.org/despite-recent-crime-spikes-decarceration-advocates-are-unrepentant

The 2022 midterm election cycle was the first real test of the police and criminal-justice “reform” movements’ political viability amid resurgent violent crime. The crime issue loomed larger than usual over some of the nation’s most heated political contests. Republicans took up the cause of those who were worried about public safety and open to a tougher approach to crime, while Democrats defended the recent leftward lurch on the criminal-justice policy front. The Democrats’ defensive strategy involved downplaying (if not outright denying) recent crime increases or dismissing any suggestion that such upticks in crime were related to depolicing efforts.

Whether this strategy worked is unclear. Democrats held off what many predicted would be a “red wave” election, but the GOP enjoyed a massive advantage among the 11 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that crime was the biggest issue. Absent any clear political price imposed on the party, at least judging by the midterm results, there remains in office a critical mass of Democrats unwilling to roll back the most misguided reforms passed to date, or to resist newer efforts to go even further.

In November, for example, the Democratic city council in Washington, D.C., voted to move forward with a plan to rewrite the city’s criminal code—all but doing away with mandatory minimum sentences, extending the right to a jury trial to misdemeanor cases, expanding the rights of convicts to petition judges for sentence reductions, and lowering the maximum penalties for various serious offenses such as burglary, robbery, and carjacking (on the rise for some time in the nation’s capital). While the proposed rewrite is not yet a done deal, the public should be disconcerted that things have gone this far.

http://Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America

Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government.
– From a 1960 report by the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. House of Representatives.

On Wednesday morning, Jamie Lee Curtis was trending on Twitter. Earlier in the week, the actress had posted a photo on Instagram showing off the handsome set of black Pollock chairs that furnish her office. It was not the chairs, however, that landed her on Twitter’s front page, but the photograph on the wall behind them. The Instagram photo has since been deleted, after thousands of amateur investigators online tweeted at Curtis to ask why there was a photo of a naked child stuffed into a suitcase hanging on her office wall.

Here was a clue pointing to Curtis’ involvement in the globalist pedophile ring known to dominate the political and cultural elite of the United States along with who knows how many other Western nations. This particular conspiracy theory, which has branches in Pizzagate and QAnon, has two great strengths. First, it can’t be disproved by contrary evidence. To take one example, the image on Curtis’ wall does not, in fact, show a child’s body crammed into a suitcase. The photo, taken by the artist Betsy Schneider, is of a young girl in a tub of water. Creepy it may be, but bad taste and ritualistic child sacrifice are not necessarily the same.

The conspiracy’s other source of strength is its basis in reality. Jeffrey Epstein really was enticing some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to a private island where he kept a harem that included underage girls trafficked into the sexual service of a global elite. Yet Epstein’s arrest, rather than dragging his horrible crimes out into the light of day, only deepened their mystery. For one thing, his well-timed suicide in a New York prison put an end to the chance that he might spill his secrets. But the secrecy remains as the FBI stonewalls requests to release files related to Epstein’s work as a Bureau source.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3820478-big-spender-biden-to-blame-for-inflation-and-coming-debt-ceiling-brawl/

In just two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, our national debt has grown by $3.8 trillion. Beginning in 1929, it took the U.S. Treasury 61 years to accumulate that much borrowing.

Yet Biden has the temerity to call Republicans “fiscally demented.” 

The fight over raising the debt ceiling is just beginning, and already the embattled president is insulting those who oppose his reckless spending, which is, as I write this, crashing our economy. It will get worse — the downturn and the name-calling. 

President Biden tossed trillions in unnecessary COVID-19 relief onto a fast-recovering economy, punching up inflation to 40-year highs as too many dollars chased too few goods.   

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reckons Biden has added $4.8 trillion to our deficits through executive actions and legislation. This is in addition to our normal spending.

Meanwhile, no one – including many Republicans – has been minding the store. 

Now we see the beginning of the recession that the Federal Reserve deems necessary to drive down inflation. Retail sales, housing and manufacturing have turned down. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said unemployment must go up and growth must go down in order to reach the central bank’s 2 percent official inflation target.   

We are, in effect, about to pay for Joe Biden’s largesse — with people losing their jobs and businesses going under. When our nation’s biggest banks set aside billions to cover expected loan losses, as they just did at the end of the year, it is because they expect companies to default on loans and people to get into trouble financially. This is not an act of God; this is because our leaders spent too much money.