RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/vivek-ramaswamy-right-america-devolving-into-tyranny/

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case. 

That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.”

Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn. 

On one side are those who believe in the founding ideals of America, the ideals summed up in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, at the center of which are the ideals of individual liberty, freedom of speech and the rule of law. 

On the other side are the “woke” haters of America as traditionally defined. These are the people who seek to tear the blindfold off the statues of justice at our court houses because, they assert, impartial justice is racist. What they want is not individual liberty, but group prerogatives based on sex, race or some other badge of supposed victimhood. 

Pace well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats, compromise between these two groups is not possible because the “wokerati” regards those who dissent not as people with different opinions but as heretics. And heretics — whether the issue be race, the climate, Covid, Hamas or this week’s preferred species of sexual exotica — cannot only be met with utter suppression. “You know you are in a war,” Ramaswamy notes, “when there is no middle ground, no room to compromise.” That’s where we are now. 

I think it very unlikely that Ramaswamy will be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania come January 2025. But he is telling the world some hard and vital truths. I hope the political class, as well as ordinary Americans, will pay him heed. Noting the many ways the financial sector, the law and the corporate and academic worlds have been “weaponized” against traditional American values, he warns that “if we lose this war, we will have full-fledged tyranny. You see, if people are free, then there will be group differences in outcomes because often groups have different preferences and talents. The only way you can make groups equal in terms of outcome is by force.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nycs-crisis-a-lesson-for-cities-everywhere/

When New Yorkers complain about announced cuts to police protection and sanitation, Mayor Eric Adams weasels back, “Don’t yell at me, yell at D.C.” Adams is trying to shift the blame to President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ open-border policy.

Don’t fall for it. The surge of migrants accounts for less than half (42%) of the city’s looming fiscal crisis. New York City was heading off a fiscal cliff before the surge.

Adams’ predecessor, spendaholic Bill de Blasio, is partly to blame. But Adams worsened the crisis by negotiating insane labor contracts — especially with the teachers union — that the city cannot afford. It’s a transparent attempt by Adams to lock in Big Labor’s support for his own mayoral reelection, never mind that he’s selling out city residents.

New Yorkers are getting ripped off. WalletHub’s Best- & Worst-Run Cities in America ranks New York a dismal 147th out of 149 cities in spending per capita to provide basic services. Only San Francisco and Chattanooga, Tennessee, score worse.

Gotham isn’t the cleanest city, or the safest, and it doesn’t offer the best public schools. Yet New York City taxpayers pay top dollar, thanks to a succession of pandering pols.

For example, New York provides any municipal employee who puts in 10 years a health insurance premium, 100% paid for with no cost sharing, for life. Even after they leave city employment. Unheard of anywhere else.

As far back as September 2022, the Big Apple’s fiscal situation was smelling rotten. Adams promised the state’s Financial Control Board that he would “not make any deals that the city cannot afford.”

This June, Adams broke that promise when he negotiated a contract with the United Federation of Teachers that dooms the city to fiscal failure. The Department of Education accounts for over a third (36%) of the city’s spending, and a staggering 46% of the city employee headcount. New York cannot recover without fiscal discipline at DOE.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/12/04/bombshell-joe-biden-was-getting-direct-monthly-payments-from-hunter-bidens-business-n4924461

Remember how Biden and the Democrats claimed repeatedly that he never spoke with his son about his business, and then the House Oversight Committee revealed evidence that Joe Biden participated in phone calls with Hunter and his associates? Suddenly, they were willing to concede the point that Joe Biden had, in fact, talked business with his son and change their story to Joe Biden “was not in business with his son.”

That was just the tip of the iceberg. The House Oversight Committee uncovered financial records, text messages, and more. They also heard whistleblower testimony and eyewitness testimony. And through it all, there were denials. 

Earlier this year, when asked about the House Oversight Committee’s investigations of the Biden Crime Family, including Joe Biden’s influence-peddling and receiving millions in bribes, Joe Biden asked, “Where’s the money?”

Fair question? Sure. Even Democrats have started to concede that Hunter Biden was merely selling the illusion of access to his father while he was vice president. At the same time, they have claimed repeatedly that Joe Biden never profited from those efforts, using those claims as proof that he couldn’t have possibly been selling influence to foreign entities like China, Ukraine, and others. But the fact is that it proves that Democrats couldn’t deny that the House Oversight Committee was on the right track.

Well, the House Oversight Committee released its latest bombshell on Monday. Subpoenaed bank records show that “Hunter Biden’s business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden.”

The Department of Justice is currently investigating Hunter Biden for tax evasion and other crimes connected to his Owasco PC account.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bank-records-show-direct-monthly-payment-from-hunter-bidens-corporation-to-joe-biden/

A corporation owned and controlled by Hunter Biden made several direct monthly payments to President Biden beginning in 2018, according to bank records released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

The subpoenaed bank records obtained by National Review reveal Owasco PC established a monthly payment of $1,380 to President Biden beginning in September 2018. The committee says the payments establish a direct benefit Biden received from his family’s foreign business dealings, despite Biden’s claims that he has never benefitted from or been involved in his son’s ventures.

“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” House Oversight chairman James Comer says in a new video detailing the findings. “At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes.”

Comer says the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

“As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” the committee added in a press release.

It was unclear based on the bank records how many monthly payments were made, but a source familiar with the committee’s probe said investigators had discovered at least three payments.

Last week, the committee released an email from a bank money-laundering investigator who expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/04/weimar-america/

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee their safety from other students

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/making_a_silk_purse_from_the_crimeridden_rubble_of_antiracism.html

Much has been said by many trying to excuse bad behavior. Inner cities have crime because… racism. Blue cities are dirty and noisy because… racism. White flight happens because… racism. Black unwed motherhood is on the rise and has become epidemic because… racism. No other reasons are given by black leadership for the failures of blacks to thrive except for… racism.

But racism does not account for these failures. Failure accounts for these failures: Failure to educate. Failure to instill a work ethic. Failure to be good and to do good. Failure to teach respect and good manners to young children. Failure to revere and promote healthy two-parent families. Failure to discourage sexual profligacy. Failure to demand excellence. Failure to reject profanity and embrace decency and honor. Instead, too many in the Black community have embraced the dysfunction within the Black culture with pride, claiming a unique historical experience that they say no one understands but other Black people.

It has been long enough making excuses for Black failures and it is past time for the respectable Black people of America to rise up against the jealous race-baiters and say “No more.” There is nothing preventing Black success that a Judeo-Christian perspective cannot address successfully. Love your neighbor means don’t steal, don’t do the crime. Be nice to each other. Respect the property and lives of others. Be on time (terribly unfashionable among “anti-racists”), work hard (ditto), have a plan to succeed, and above all get educated at a school that does not indoctrinate but educates, which excludes most urban government schools. Unasked-for advice: Do not respect, honor, or adopt the malignant principles of those who teach anti-white racism in the guise of Critical Race Theory, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, or “Anti-Racism” (anti-white racism with an oxymoronic name.)

When a group blames others, they will not succeed because they are always relying on those others to change. When the blamed ones don’t change, the professional victims believe that it’s perfectly okay to steal, cheat, lie, and break other people’s stuff in the name of reparations. That is not the path to success or to a better place in life, although it is a temporary frisson of schadenfreude.

Crime in Blue cities is off the charts because Soros-appointed district attorneys have banded together to excuse crime committed by Black perpetrators. This harms Black people first, then Black neighborhoods, Black aspirations and in itself is criminal. When you teach theft, you get theft. When you get theft, good businesses leave your neighborhood. When they do leave, they take the economic base with them, and who gets hurt? Innocent, freedom-loving, decent people get hurt because they’re often stuck there with the crime they tolerated. The raped businesses will leave and set up shop where they are welcomed.

https://www.racket.news/p/lol-before-and-after-in-house-testimony

I know I said I wasn’t going to dwell on this, but some things are too funny. In yesterday’s surreal House hearing on censorship, the Democrats’ witness Olivia Troye denied to North Carolina congressman Dan Bishop something she’d said in her opening statement.

It turns out the time between Troye statements “Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship” and “I’ve never said this was a conspiracy, you have not heard that comment from me” was exactly one hour. That has to be a first of some kind, although one minute would’ve been more impressive. Just an FYI from the train home…

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-george-soros-funds-anti-semitism

Congress is debating legislation to strip tax-exempt status from “terrorist-supporting organizations.” The Open Society Foundations would be a prime target.

As pro-Hamas, virulent anti-Semitic propaganda against Israel and Jews erupted and continues spreading after Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, the silence of the poster boy of anti-Semitic victimhood, George Soros, is deafening.

Deafening but not surprising.

In his 1995 book, “Soros on Soros,” the Hungarian-American financier declared that Zionism “doesn’t appeal” to him because it is “the founding of a nation [Israel] where the Jews are in the majority.” For Soros, “being a Jew [is] being in a minority.” He also asserted moral equivalence between the Jews’ response to attacks and that of their attackers, saying that sometimes Jews choose to “identify with their oppressors” and even “try to become like them.”

In 2003, at a Yivo Institute for Jewish Research event, Soros blamed the rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred in Europe on the George W. Bush administration’s war on Islamic terrorism and “likened the behavior of Israel [in defending itself against Arab terrorist attacks] to that of the Nazis, invoking some psychological jargon about victims becoming victimizers.” He was booed, and many walked out of the event.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/climate-protests-at-the-met

So there I was, in the middle of the opening night of Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, when the shouting started. “Climate protesters,” or “climate activists”—the usual grotesques—were shouting “No opera on a dead planet,” and other such inanities. They placed themselves around the theater, timing it so that when one was arrested, another started shouting somewhere else. I counted five interruptions, though the first press reports say there were only four; did I get it wrong? The audience was displeased; I heard shouts of shame! and even, briefly from one member of the audience, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! The management finally announced that the program would go on no matter what, keeping the lights on so that security could remove people more quickly; either the thugs were exhausted, or the remainder figured that it wasn’t worth bothering with. So we finished the opera, with too much light, and (at least for me) some nervousness at every loud noise, thinking it might be another interruption.

There have been at least two previous intrusions at operas, in Amsterdam and Milan. Less than a day ago, pro-Hamas goons tried to interrupt the lighting of the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Less than a week ago, others tried to disrupt the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It’s a general campaign to try to make normal life impossible until you give in to the radical demands.

That’s the short version, but it’s worth considering the various elements.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/02/why-are-todays-politics-so-awful/

Editor’s note: This is a first in a four-part series).

People often ask, “Why are today’s politics so awful?” There are several reasons, many of which will be explored in this four-part series. In a nutshell (pun intended), the Communications Revolution has enormously contributed to the belief that politics is more awful than ever due to its impact upon the public, the media, the politicians, and the country.

Yet, before considering these reasons, one must avoid the temptation to romanticize the political past as a time of eminently genteel debate in a country where that civility led to a destructive civil war. Even during the period of our nation’s founding, American politics has been contentious as evinced by the political battles between the Royalists and the Revolutionaries. Later, one need only look at how Federalist political pamphleteers attacked President Thomas Jefferson (with the truth, by the way); or how President Andrew Jackson was decried as a “tyrant” and “would-be king” by his political opponents, obloquies later echoed in attacks upon Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, while the intensity and invective of political battle has not waned, its visibility has exponentially increased. Due to the Communications Revolution, on a subway or runway, at home or abroad, 24 hours every single day, people possess the ability to casually survey and/or directly engage in politics. No longer does one have to hope the local newspaper publishes their letter to the editor or hope someone in Washington reads their constituent letter. The expression of one’s political opinion and/or agenda can be voiced to the political class and one’s fellow citizens instantaneously and – especially, when in concert with like-minded individuals – effectively.

The consequence of the Communication Revolution’s empowerment of the public it to make politics appear more prevalent and contentious than in the past. While true that more people are publicly expressing their political views, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are new to their opinions or that the intensity of these opinions has increased. What has undoubtedly happened, though, is that technology has facilitated the public’s ability to express their views.

This results in the sense that Americans are more political and, generally, politics more prevalent and awful than ever. True, it can be a bit unsettling to see a friend or neighbor’s political post, more so when one never thought that friend or neighbor shared your views or party affiliation. (They feel the same when they see your post).