RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/voter-shaming-by-the-left-hits-a-new-low/

There is a huge difference between rejecting a politician and debasing his supporters.

(June 23, 2020 / JNS) During a lecture at the New York-based Modern Language Association in the immediate aftermath of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election in November 1972, the late American film critic, Pauline Kael, made a memorable statement.

“I live in a rather special world,” the outspoken movie reviewer acknowledged. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where [the rest of them] are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes, when I’m in a theater, I can feel them.”

Though the quote has been bastardized a bit over the years, its gist remains intact—and not only in the United States. What it illustrated nearly five decades ago still holds in Western societies: That no matter how widespread a stance, if it is antithetical to the sentiment and sensibilities of the so-called “intelligentsia” (and of those aspiring to the title), it is rendered invisible.

It is also seen, or at least portrayed, as frightening in some way. Kael admitted to knowing only a single Nixon voter, but said that she could sense others lurking, almost threateningly, in the rows of seats around her in darkened cinemas.

Imagine her amazement, then, when the faceless figures “outside [her] ken” turned out to be a majority of the electorate. After all, no such people ever had graced her table—unless, perhaps, they were serving the meal or cleaning up after it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-presidential-campaign-simile-storm-tossed-galleon/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Right now, Trump’s ship has been hit in succession by sudden headwinds and violent storms of impeachment, the contagion, the lockdown, the tragic killing of George Floyd, and both the ensuring peaceful protests and violent looting, rioting, and arson. The result is that his voyage to port has nearly stopped. Even warped polls suggest that in the past few days he has caught little wind in his sails, while Joe Biden, asleep at the wheel, lets his crew ever so slowly capture a tiny breeze or two and drift ahead.

But to Trump’s rear, the powerful tailwinds of summer and autumn are rising. And they are considerable: the enfeebled candidacy of a cognitively impaired Joe Biden who at some point must emerge from his basement and remind the world he is inert; the contention over Joe Biden’s hard left-wing diversity VP selection that is de facto the Democratic presidential candidate; the looming indictments of John Durham; the steady recovery of the economy; the likely eventual waning of the virus; the loosening of the lockdowns, especially given the asymmetrical blue-state exemptions given to millions of protestors and rioters who never practiced social distancing as they looted stores, entered restaurants to harass customers, and crowded together to shout and spray; and, most important, the growing public pushback against the looting, burning, shooting, and rioting. All that is a powerful collection of favorable windy currents.

If Trump lets these fresh winds at his back catch his full sails and ride the waves, then he will coast to port and victory

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/22/trumps-base-remains-solid-as-political-tide-turns/

Despite 2020’s tough start, Trump’s base remains solid, which bodes well for his November.  National polls have recently shown a widening Biden lead; considering the current political environment, this is not surprising.  What is surprising is how well Trump has held up, and how well it positions him as political tides turn.  

The current Real Clear Politics average of national presidential polling gives Biden a 50.1% to 41.3% lead less than five months from November’s election.  This fits conventional expectations that 2020’s rough first half is damaging the president’s re-election chances.  However, looking inside these national polls reveals a crucial shortcoming: They are not polling those most likely to vote.

Of the eleven national polls making up RCP’s average, ten sampled “registered” voters, not “likely” voters.  Registered voter polls are historically less accurate and over-represent Democrats in their results. 

One likely voter poll not included in RCP’s average is Zogby’s recent one (conducted 6/1-6/2 of 1,007 likely voters) which has Trump and Biden deadlocked at 46% apiece.  Everything in Zogby’s was not perfect for the president; his approval/disapproval rating was negative — 48% approve/51% disapprove.  However, as Zogby noted: “During this almost exact moment at the end of Barack Obama’s first term, his job approval numbers were very similar…48% approve/50% disapprove.”

One poll is not an election.  However, “registered” are not “likely” voters either, and the only ones who count will be November voters.  Zogby’s poll does indicate that Trump’s base will figure prominently among them.  The surest sign they will is that they are sticking with him during the most difficult moment of his presidency.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/21/democratic-dirty-tricks-sabotage-trump-tulsa-rally-n557476

Tik-Tok and K-Pop users are claiming they reserved hundreds of tickets for Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally, never having any intention of showing up. The result was a half-empty arena in Tulsa for the president’s post-coronavirus restart of his campaign.

In fact, Twitter is alight this morning with reports that dozens of teens reserved thousands of rally tickets to sabotage the optics of Trump’s speech.

Trending on Twitter this morning is #EveryoneLaughingAtYouDonald and #TrumpRallyFail.

Steve Schmidt

✔ @SteveSchmidtSES
My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens. @realDonaldTrump you have been failed by your team. You have been deserted by your faithful. No one likes to root for the losing team. @ProjectLincoln https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1272191356845391875 …

Brad Parscale

✔ @parscale

Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.
Saturday is going to be amazing! https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1271581845910704128 …

Steve Schmidt was John McCain’s campaign manager and a driving force behind the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Daily Mail:

He then added: ‘This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol.’

The gloating is absolutely nauseating. The Trump rally was sabotaged by political “dirty trick” worthy of the Nixon campaign and Democrats are celebrating?

https://pjmedia.com/election/bryan-preston/2020/06/20/live-feed-watch-president-trumps-huge-tulsa-rally-n557379

President Donald Trump holds his first rally since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, forcing major sports, music and all other public events to shut down along with most of the economy.

The same media and health care “experts” who lauded the mass protests of the past few weeks, many of which turned or are still turning violent, have been out in force making Trump’s rally sound like it’s the most dangerous thing for public health since the medieval plague.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has handled these media barrages with style and aplomb.

Trump’s rally also comes in the context of Democrat-run cities allowing protesters to topple statues of figures from American history, and defunding police in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin has been fired and charged with murder.

Violent crime rates had been declining nationwide since 1994, but are now on the rise again as Democrat-run cities abdicate their responsibilities, even to the point of ceding territory to antifa in the heart of Seattle, Washington.

President Trump has declared himself both the “law and order” president and implemented an executive order toward police reform. He has also led a sentencing reform effort, the First Step Act, with the support of Kim Kardashian and her husband, Kanye West.

https://americanmind.org/post/china-is-on-the-ballot-in-2020/

American voters will decide if the PRC wins.

In early May, President Donald Trump ordered a federal retirement fund to scrap its plans to shift several billion dollars’ worth of U.S. government employee savings into Chinese stocks. The administration is now planning a broader review of China’s unfair and potentially dangerous usage of American capital markets. This is about far more than mundane matters of bureaucracy and asset allocation. It epitomizes the existential battle facing America.

The Status Quo

Our public servants will now no longer be underwriting military contractors that support the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) People’s Liberation Army—an army that has threatened U.S. servicemen and engaged in espionage against U.S. civilians. Nor will we be funding “enterprises” indicted for violating U.S. sanctions in conducting business with enemies like CPC customer Iran and satrap North Korea; or technology companies that produce the surveillance equipment used to run the CPC’s modern-day gulags and supply other police states. These are all welcome developments.

But the fact that these travesties would have transpired had the Trump administration not intervened is a sobering truth with implications that transcend capital markets. It touches on the long-term competition into which America has finally entered with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Near-term, the 2020 election is critical to sustaining this competition.

Following the Cold War, the stated rationale for U.S.-PRC relations was one of economic self-interest and idealism: Economic liberalization would lead to political and cultural liberalization. Relatedly, the story went, an integrated and prosperous China would be a peaceful and stable one.

For decades, Joe Biden has been one of the most senior proponents of this view. During the height of the 2000 debate that resulted in the granting of permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to China, putting it on a glidepath to World Trade Organization accession that would accelerate its drive toward superpower status, Biden asserted that PRC “prosperity…has put China on a path toward ever-greater political and economic freedom.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/13/will-democrats-do-the-right-thing-respecting-catholics/

A coalition of prominent Catholics has asked prominent Democrats to step up and defend American Catholics against anti-Catholic bigotry. Will they do it?

Anti-Catholicism, it has been said, is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.

I’m not sure anyone would accuse Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) of being an intellectual. Her colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee such as Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) are also safe from that accusation (and simple courtesy requires that we pass by Hawaii’s Senator Mazie Hirono in silence). But by dint of long occupation in the corridors of power, they all have imbibed the shallow, pseudo-enlightened anti-Catholicism that comes with membership in The Club. 

Examples are legion, but one memorable exhibition came in 2017. Amy Coney Barrett, a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and a prominent Roman Catholic, was nominated by President Trump for a position on the Court of Appeals in the Seventh Circuit. Sen. Feinstein, like a mosquito buzzing furiously to get inside the netting and draw blood, clearly was troubled by Barrett’s Catholicism, especially as it related the question of abortion in general and Roe v. Wade in particular. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Feinstein observed, “and that’s a concern.” 

Judge Barrett pointed out that she would not, as an Appeals Court Judge, be in a position to adjudicate the Constitutionality of Roe v. Wade. Moreover, she said, her originalist judicial philosophy respected precedent and strove to keep politics out of the judicial process. We have politicians to do politics. She would follow the law, not her personal preferences, in deciding cases. 

The exchange went viral, serving to highlight the reflexive hostility to Catholics, and indeed to practicing Christians generally, among our elites. It also highlighted a deep, er, tension between the habitual badgering of Catholic nominees about the niceties of their faith and the prohibition against religious tests for office enshrined with all possible clarity in Article VI of the Constitution. “[N]o religious Test,” that brief Article concludes, “shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The president of the Anti-Defamation League, the president of Princeton University, the president of Notre Dame University, and the Harvard Law Review, are among those who, stirred by Feinstein’s admonition, have publicly declared their concern about this violation of the spirit if not the letter of Article VI.