RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2024/08/21/the-return-of-history-liberal-values-and-global-realities-ukraine-russia-europe/

My socialisation into polite liberal society—my crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis—helped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things. I failed to appreciate that my experience was born of a unique moment in human history, and that my enculturation represented a break with normal human existence.

Rather than people competing in conquest and blood, as was the case for nearly all of human history, postwar liberal democracies relied upon consent and converging economic incentives to a greater degree than at any previous time. In this new world, it was taken for granted that liberal values would appeal to anyone given the choice, and reorient people towards economic interdependence and international cooperation. Western societies were free and prosperous, so after the Cold War, many Western commentators and analysts naturally assumed that those newly liberated from tyranny would want to emulate them.

The time I spent living and working in a small Baltic country bordered by an aggressively imperial neighbour forced me to reassess the assumptions with which I was raised. Lithuanians understand that the default state of human beings is not cooperation and humanist values. They were therefore not surprised that, after the Cold War, some actors continued to defy economic self-interest in the name of ideology and festering resentment, bucking the trend of liberalisation.

A failure to appreciate this reality is where well-intentioned liberals like me went wrong.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/22/who-is-destroying-democracy-in-darkness/

The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.

Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic.

That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House.

A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant the false accusation of Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election.

That gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled the Trump 2016 campaign. That hoax would later sidetrack 22 months of his presidency before being proven a fantasy.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left next birthed the Russian laptop disinformation campaign.

That hoax also warped a presidential debate with false charges that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to conspire with Trump.

Those unusual efforts continued during the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, the allies of one campaign sought to persuade some 16 states to try to remove a major party’s likely nominee from their primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to smother a Trump third presidential bid in its infancy, and thus once again not allow the people to accept or reject his candidacy.

Nearly simultaneously, four federal, state, and local prosecutors filed dozens of felony charges against Trump.

They all shared some strange similarities.

These indictments would likely not have been filed, had Trump not run for office. Nor would any of them have proceeded had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican seeking reelection.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ferguson-inaugurated-ten-years-of-lies-about-race-in-america

This month marks the tenth anniversary of events that changed the trajectory of this country, and not for the better. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Riots erupted the next day and continued for months nationwide. Black Lives Matter exploited the mayhem it had helped cause, helping it swell into a malign global force. The activist model pioneered at Ferguson has had a lasting impact on American politics, as this year’s pro-Hamas demonstrations prove.

The catalyzing event was a personal tragedy, but from a journalistic perspective, it should have been pretty ho-hum. Wilson was a cop, and Brown had just robbed a convenience store, violently overpowering the clerk. When Wilson tried to stop him in the street, Brown scuffled with him, reaching inside his police SUV through the driver’s window. Brown then ran off and Wilson gave chase. At some point, Brown turned around and charged Wilson. That was when Wilson killed him.

The entire encounter, the Department of Justice later said in a revealing report, lasted two minutes. And that’s how long the story would have lasted, too, except that Wilson was white and Brown was black, and had just turned 18 less than three months earlier.

Those with political motivations manipulated the tragedy in several ways. They claimed that Brown had tried to surrender, raising his hands and pleading with Wilson, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” but the policeman still wantonly gunned him down. That fed the narrative that the killing was part of an epidemic of police killing unarmed blacks in America. And this, in turn, reinforced a theme that the country is “systemically racist” and oppressive.