RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/28/americas-lab-rats/

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/girling-the-boy-scouts

The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It admitted girls to its program for 11- to 17-year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”

Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio—the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America,” the name of the parent organization? It does. That the Boy Scouts cannot tolerate even an atavistic use of “boy” reveals how powerful the impulse is to efface males from our culture. The transformation of the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America is an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover.

The need for an entity that valorizes males, or that merely acknowledges their existence, is greater today than when the Boy Scouts was founded in the early twentieth century. The British war veteran Robert Baden-Powell despaired at the lost boys he saw in London’s slums, seemingly deficient in the Victorian virtues of honesty, hardiness, and self-reliance. Baden-Powell envisioned an organization that would combine boys’ craving for heroism with a code of chivalry, wrapped in the lure of the outdoors. He and his North American counterparts understood masculinity as self-sacrificing and ennobling. Chief Scout Citizen Theodore Roosevelt reminded the American Boy Scouts in 1915 that “manliness in its most rigorous form can be and ought to be accompanied by unselfish consideration for the rights and interests of others.” Baden-Powell wrote that the Scout must ask himself, when forced to choose between two courses of action: “ ‘Which is my duty?’ that is, ‘Which is best for other people?’ ”

The value of an all-boys organization was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate—ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-a-jew-jews-are-nothing-new/

“As-a-Jew” has become a widely used term for Jews who publicly denounce Israel and even call for its dissolution but commonly preface their condemning the Jewish state with assertions that they speak “as Jews.” The intent is typically to convey that their anti-Israel stance is consistent with Jewish morality and sensitivity, which their pro-Israel co-religionists are supposedly betraying.

Among the more well-known examples of as-a-Jew Jews who directly or indirectly promote Israel’s demise are members of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which ally themselves with Hamas-affiliated organizations in their militating for dissolution of the Jewish state. Numerous individuals, including Peter Beinart and Judith Butler, have virtually made careers of plowing the same field.

Since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza to dismantle Hamas and prevent its promised endless repetition of that slaughter, as-a-Jew Jews have parroted Hamas in its claims of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. They have done so even though the ratio of civilian to terrorist casualties in Gaza is the lowest ever recorded in a conflict in which one party has – in violation of international law – imbedded itself in urban populations and used those populations as human shields. As-a-Jew Jews cast this embrace of Hamas propaganda as an expression of their more profound Jewish morality.

But the superior morality as-a-Jew Jews ascribe to themselves predates, of course, October 7. Its foundational thesis is that Jews are uniquely disqualified from any right of national self-determination and are remiss in asserting and clinging to such a right. Proper, moral Jewish behavior dictates, according to these people, that Israeli Jews accept becoming a minority in an Arab-dominated state. It dictates allowing the descendants of those Palestinians who fled the 1947-48 war – a war which they and their Arab allies initiated to quash creation of a Jewish state in a small part of Mandate Palestine – to return to what is now Israel and to transform the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean into the twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” The as-a-Jew proponents of this course characterize their envisioned entity as a “binational state,” but it would inevitably be an Arab majority state. These righteous as-a-Jews are no doubt cognizant of how well religious and ethnic minorities – whether Christians or Yazidi or Druze or Muslim Kurds – are treated in the great majority of the twenty-two current Arab states. Yet they have no qualms in subjecting the seven million Jews of Israel to similar treatment.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/want-more-unity-and-freedom-try-returning-to-constitutional-federalism/

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.