RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/driving-out-scapegoat-bruce-thornton/

After last Wednesday’s Trump rally at the Ellipse in D.C., some of the up to 100,000 present walked over to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to ratify the Electoral College vote. While there an even smaller number, a few hundred at the most, broke into the Capitol lobby, with some proceeding into a few Congressional offices.

So, a rally attended peacefully by the majority of people, was taken over by a small mob of knuckleheads and day-trippers who invaded the Capitol. Sadly, a woman and a police officer were killed, and three other protestors died from “medical emergencies.” Scores more including police officers were injured.

The police authorities in D.C. had bungled badly their security preparations, and bear a large share of the responsibility for this fiasco. But as always, the guilt lies with those who broke the law and should be punished. “The doer suffers,” as Aeschylus says.

But after five months of incessant rioting, vandalizing, and looting tolerated, ignored, rationalized, excused, encouraged, or even celebrated by the progressive Democrat leadership, media, commentators, mayors, and governors, this half-day-long violent episode is pretty far down on the list of civic mayhem––and the only one of hundreds of protests this year that was fomented by supporters of the President. Indeed, maybe security was light because Trump has conducted massive rallies for four years without any significant violence.

Reaction, however, to the Capitol riot has elicited even more-intense hysterical attacks on the President. Worse, now Republican and conservative lawmakers and commentators have indulged the bathetic rhetorical excesses that mechanically issue from Dems and NeverTrump Republicans skulking in digital hovels like The Lincoln Project and the Bulwark. They are demanding the President’s resignation, impeachment, or removal from office via the 25th Amendment, some preposterously professing anxiety that Trump will launch a Parthian nuclear strike as he leaves office.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/jaques-barzun-and-the-tragedy-of-race-thinking/

“This anxious wrangling which goes on about books and plays seems at times trivial but it is in fact fundamental. If democratic culture yields on this point no prospect lies ahead but that of increased animosity among pressure groups…”

The 1965 quote above is from Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), who made a very important contribution to the debate about racism and affirmative action. He issued a warning that went unheeded, and the explosive emergence of Black Lives Matter underlines the value of his advice.

Barzun grew up in a French household, where his parents conducted a modernist salon, and he completed high school in the US. He entered Columbia College in 1923, graduating four years later at the top of his class, then he taught at Columbia University and became a full professor in 1945, Dean of the Graduate Faculties in 1955, and the inaugural Dean of Faculties and Provost of the University in 1958. In his long career as a teacher, scholar and administrator he wrote, edited or translated some 40 books.

His first serious research was a dissertation on class and race in pre-revolutionary France, published some years later as Race, A Study in Modern Superstition (1937).  This was not written as a tract for the times because it grew out of research on cultural history that started long before Hitler became a significant figure. Barzun claimed the protracted dispute in France over the “race” of the nobility versus the bourgeoisie became one of the divisive factors that contributed to the French Revolution. Moreover “race-thinking” persisted after the Revolution as a component of the struggles between nations, political parties, religious faiths and social groups. For Barzun, “race-thinking” is one of the ways to justify collective hostility and it is most dangerous and powerful when it  operates in partnership with other motives such as the nationalism of the Nazis, the  socialism of the communists and, nowadays, the radicalism of Black Lives Matter.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/10/flashback-just-months-ago-democrats-blocked-a-resolution-condemning-mob-violence/

When a mob of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday, leaders from both political parties universally condemned the historic act of political violence.

“To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today- you did not win,” Vice-President Mike Pence stated to the chamber shortly after the rioters were expelled from the building by police using tear gas and percussion grenades. “Violence never wins.” He was joined by the Republican senators across the board, including those who had backed plans to object to the election’s certification.

After months ignoring and justifying Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots, Democrats also condemned the Capitol violence. “This assault is just that. It shows the weakness of those who’ve had to show through violence what their message was,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said.

Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., echoed the sentiment, arguing those who using political violence should face the harshest penalties available. “Those who performed these reprehensible acts cannot be called protesters – no, these were rioters and insurrectionists, goons and thugs, domestic terrorists… they must and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The cross-party condemnations came as a welcomed move. But that very the same Congress was anything but united on the issue of mob violence remarkably recently.

This July, those same congressional Democrats killed a resolution aimed at curbing mob violence. The bill, which was spearheaded by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, came about after an unarmed Utah man was murdered by a mob of left-wing activists. At least 30 people, ranging in age from 14-77, were killed in largely left-wing riots in summer 2020.