RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prosecute-the-new-york-bridge-blockers

On the first commuting morning of the first full workweek of 2024, New York’s permanent “protesting” class demonstrated its tactical approach for the year: to make us miserable on our daily trips, even as the city struggles to attract pre-2020 commuting and tourism crowds. Under the rubric of “Shut it Down for Palestine,” a few hundred people on Monday managed, indeed, to shut down all three Lower Manhattan bridges to Brooklyn, as well as the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, just after the morning rush. They created gridlock that inconvenienced tens of thousands of drivers, bus riders, bike riders, and walkers. Following months of smaller-scale actions, it was agitators’ most disruptive action yet—and organizers will continue to escalate their behavior unless Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul make clear that blocking key transportation corridors is not “peaceful protest.”

Protests on all sides of any issue are a fact of urban life. But protesters are not free to obstruct movement; the First Amendment protects only speech and assembly, not unlawful obstruction of roads, transit, or sidewalks.  

Such illegal obstruction is the core tactic, though, of the post-2020 left-wing shut-it-all-down movement, and it started before George Floyd summer. On the last day of January 2020, a self-styled anarchist movement called “Decolonize this Place” swarmed Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. The few hundred masked agitators wanted to “disrupt” commuting until New York met their demands, including free transit and eliminating all policing in the subway system.  

They didn’t succeed in disrupting much of anything (though they did vandalize property), and the commuters who made their way through the mob might have seen the whole thing as a one-off aggravation. Even Occupy Wall Street, the precursor movement of nearly a decade before, hadn’t regularly interrupted New Yorkers on their daily journeys to work or to run errands. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20294/supreme-court-saving-democracy

Historians have an enormous advantage over the rest of us: they have the unique luxury of looking back through time and, with the power of hindsight, pinpointing the exact moment a new era began. Yet there are events that are so momentous, so crucial, and so obvious, that sometimes even those living in the moment can recognize their historic significance.

We are living through that moment.

Over the last several days, the turmoil surrounding the question of whether bureaucrats can unilaterally remove Donald Trump’s name from a presidential campaign ballot has only intensified. Colorado and Maine have already taken this action and other states are mulling the same.

As observed in a previous essay by this author, these actions attack the very fabric of our representative form of government. The idea that without so much as due process unelected persons in an individual state can remove a potential presidential candidate is the stuff of nightmares for a democracy.

Even leading Democrats have voiced opposition to this latest con by “ballot bandits.”

What this means, however, is that the future of our nation is now to the be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To their credit, they have recognized this threat and their need to consider the arguments as a matter of urgency for, make no mistake, this is an existential threat to our nation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dark-side-of-free-speech/

The ongoing protests against Israel––from its defense policies and warfighting tactics, to its very existence as a nation and a people––have featured levels of irrational hatred and despicable endorsements of genocidal terrorists. The U.S., of course, is also a target not just for being Israel’s enabler, but for alleged historical crimes like “settler colonialism,” racism, and genocide. These charges are morally idiotic, ethically incoherent, and historically challenged. And they serve and advance political agendas dangerous for our national interests and security.

That such mendacious protests are legal in most Western nations reflects one of the foundational principles of Western civilization: the freedom of ordinary citizens to criticize and challenge their own country’s policies and actions. But these recent protests highlight the dangers of that freedom: the nurturing and spreading of a national self-loathing that undermines the patriotism and loyalty any country needs to survive.

Of all the world’s great civilizations, none has been as critically self-conscious as the West.  Starting with the ancient Greeks, the West has been willing to question its own beliefs and institutions, make them objects of thought and criticism, search for their meaning and significance, and use this process to make innovative improvements. The Greeks, as the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt said, “seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity.”

Slavery, for example, has been a global evil since history began, and still persists in some regions of the world today. The Greeks’ critical examination of this practice––back then, no more questionable than the domestication of animals––on the one hand led to a justification for it, such as Aristotle’s infamous argument that those in bondage are “slaves by nature,” since they lack rational self-control and so can be justly controlled by another.

On the other hand, thinking critically about slavery also generated questions about the justice of it, as the early 4th century BC rhetorician Alcidamas did when he said, “The god gave freedom to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” It took two millennia, but this early argument that slavery is a consequence of force, and thus unnatural and unjust, bore fruit in the late 18th century when Christians started the West on the road to abolition.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/09/senator-floats-garlic-as-newest-national-security-threat/

The U.S. faces rapidly changing and increasingly precarious geopolitical conditions. Americans worry that communist China could become the new global polestar, that a revanchist Russia’s ambitions could stretch Ukraine into NATO, and that unrest in the Middle East could once again entangle the U.S. forces. Now, policymakers have identified a new looming threat: imported garlic.

Last week, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott asked the Commerce Department to investigate the national security risks posed by “Communist Chinese garlic.” Scott demands thoroughness; he wants an inquiry into “all grades of garlic, whole or separated into constituent cloves, whether or not peeled, chilled, fresh, frozen, provisionally preserved or packed in water or other neutral substance.” Should the department rule against China, the agency would likely impose new tariffs to protect “national security.”

Scott’s profoundly goofy request serves as a reminder that too many politicians, keen to serve some constituent industry, happily will invoke the specter of foreign threats to justify their preferred domestic economic interventions. Convincing bureaucrats to institute tariffs unilaterally avoids the procedural and political difficulties of passing legislation or otherwise operating the ordinary machinery of democratic policymaking.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/09/the-tax-and-command-party/

In the sphere of Democratic Party politics, taxes can never be high enough and government never big enough.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre drove home this sad fact with a sledge hammer last week when she said “Republican tax cuts are responsible for about 90%” of the federal debt that has reached a record $34 trillion, and is larger than the entire U.S. economy, which is not quite $27 trillion.

It is insane to believe this. But Democrats cling to the narrative with the same fanaticism that drove Karl Marx. Of the obvious connection, we will say no more – for the moment. 

No government has ever had a revenue problem. Deficits are the product overspending. Yes, it’s that simple. Families know this. Businesses know this. Yet somehow policymakers – from both parties, unfortunately – refuse to operate under this fundamental truth. Freely and irresponsibly spending other people’s money is deeply ingrained within them.

This is especially true in Washington, where spending has with rare exception exceeded revenues for more than a half century. From 1968 to 2019, federal outlays averaged 20.3% of GDP. Projections indicate that by 2050, it will surpass 30% of GDP.

As the government grows, the private sector must shrink, at least in proportion to the entire economy. Where does it end? Do the Democrats have a point at which they say “enough”? Some might. But the trajectory of the party is a clear indication that most prefer a country in which government, not the private sector, dominates economic and social life.

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/01/08/a-stunning-pro-hamas-protesters-block-seattle-interstate-for-hours-n4925294

If it’s Washington, D.C., you get car-jacked. In Chicago, you get shot. In L.A., you get crowded out by RV-driving “homeless” tourists. And in Seattle, you suffer all that and get trapped by protesters. For hours.

On Saturday, pro-Hamas protesters Saturday flooded Seattle’s biggest interstate and blocked traffic for close to three hours. The protesters supporting the terrorist group swarmed overpasses and flooded Interstate 5, which runs through the middle of the city. Amid the six miles-long backup of cars was at least one ambulance.

Police and state patrol officers attempted to hold peace talks with the Hamas supporters.

But as you can see, that didn’t go so well because after this show of force, the protesters were there for hours and hours and hours into the night.  

Fox News 13 in Seattle reports that the protesters used tools to cut through the fence to sneak onto the freeway. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cease-fire-now-pro-palestinian-protesters-disrupt-bidens-south-carolina-campaign-speech/

Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted Joe Biden’s campaign speech on Monday afternoon in Charleston, S.C., calling on the president to demand a cease-fire in Gaza, where the Israeli Defense Forces are continuing their offensive military campaign three months after Hamas’s brutal assault in Israel.

Biden supporters in the audience countered the protesters’ “cease-fire now” chants Monday afternoon by yelling “four more years,” prompting the president to acknowledge that the conflict continues to roil his own base into the new year.

“I understand their passion,” Biden said from the podium in South Carolina, the first Democratic primary state in this year’s nominating calendar. “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza, using all that I can to do.”

The interruption undercut Biden’s emotional remarks from Mother Emanuel AME Church, where the president again voiced support for a ban on “assault weapons” as he spoke about the gruesome mass shooting there in 2015 that left nine people dead.

“The Word of God was pierced by bullets of hate and rage propelled by not just gunpowder, but by a poison, a poison that’s for too long haunted this nation,” Biden said of the brutal mass shooting that occurred nearly nine years ago. “And what’s that poison? White supremacy.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-protesters-dont-want-to-be-popular/

Pivoting off anti-Israel protesters’ latest effort to inconvenience as many Americans as possible, Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar wonders what it is that these demonstrators think they’re accomplishing with stunts like these:

Disrupting traffice at the Holland Tunnel’

This latest disruptive display is of a piece with similar efforts by Israel’s American critics to make themselves as unattractive as possible. Pro-Palestinian protesters have attempted to shut down air travel out of some of America’s busiest hubs. They made it their mission to ruin holiday celebrations and parades. They have terrorized tourists, harassed commuters, and generally organized themselves around the principle that “joy is canceled.”

Kraushaar wonders what these protesters think they’re achieving since their activism has had almost no effect on Americans’ lopsided support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Nor has their activism “dampened support on Capitol Hill for the Jewish state in its war against Hamas.” Observers might be tempted to conclude that the demonstrations have backfired, but that conclusion is available only to those who believe the protesters are motivated by anything other than their own self-conception as enlightened outsiders.

If, however, we allow ourselves to be open to the conclusion that the protesters cherish their movement’s exclusivity more than its efficacy, their tactics make perfect sense. A mass movement is a movement that is willing to make concessions. It does not make the perfect the enemy of the good. It organizes itself around one principle and seeks a handful of achievable objectives, all of which can only be durably secured through incremental progress. Does that sound at all like these anti-Israel demonstrators? Indeed, does that describe any of today’s most visible protest movements?

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/08/a-culture-in-collapse/

In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.

The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.

Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.

What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.

In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.

Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.

Financial Implosion

As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:

1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/08/biden-takes-lying-with-statistics-to-a-whole-new-level/

The headlines on Friday were that the economy created 216,000 jobs, more than expected and a sign of continued strength in the economy.

“This morning’s report confirms that 2023 was a great year for American workers,” President Joe Biden said.

Hurray!

But wait a minute. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) previously reported that there were 157,087,000 “non-farm payroll” jobs in November. The number of these jobs in December, it now says, was 157,232,000.

That’s a gain of only 145,000.

So how did Biden manage to claim that the economy created 216,000 jobs in December?

Easy. All you have to do is cut the number of jobs in November by 71,000 and then measure December’s gain against that new, lower number.

Et voilà!

Instead of 157,087,000 jobs in November, the BLS now says there were 157,016,000. Subtract that from 157,232,000 and you get … 216,000!