RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/06/seeing-our-adversaries-with-clear-eyes
Middle-aged men finish their work for the day, overseeing exterminations at Auschwitz, and retire to the comfort of their homes, wives, and children. Young female telephone, telegraph, and radio operators who send and receive messages about who shall live and who shall die take a break to relax in the sun.

It was all part of life in and around history’s largest killing factory, as showcased in a set of jarring photos that are housed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and that come to life in a moving new play, “Here There Are Blueberries” – which premiered in La Jolla and just passed through the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington.

The photos and play call to mind “the banality of evil,” the phrase that philosopher Hannah Arendt coined in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She concluded that Eichmann, who helped spearhead Hitler’s “final solution,” was less a monster than a normal person, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” He was a former day laborer who could perform the evilest of deeds with nary a moral concern, a cog in a machine of ordinary people, living otherwise ordinary lives, in a country renowned for its advanced culture.

We see Auschwitz’s worker bees, but we also see top Nazi leaders – including Rudolf Hoss, who was most responsible for building Auschwitz and was its longest-serving commandant, and Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed the vilest of medical experiments on its prisoners.

Thus, the play offers lessons not just about the multifaceted drives of average people, but about those of individual leaders.

The play centers around 116 pictures and captions in an album that was assembled in meticulous fashion by Karl Hocker, a top aide to Auschwitz’s last commandant, Richard Baer.

https://victorhanson.com

We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans. 

I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and in most of the major capitals and large cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, etc., as well as the first-, second-, and third-world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.

Over the last 40 years, I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in “bad areas,” lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to their hinterlands. I have been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006–07, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and 1974 war in Cyprus, and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur War. I have seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Khadafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe.

And yet, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo or in the worst environs of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square were routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse. Were these scenes being filmed for The Last of Us?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-nation-two-sets-of-laws/

When Barack Obama announced that he was unilaterally legalizing millions of illegal aliens while further opening the border, he described it as using “discretion about whom to prosecute”.

In the years since, pro-crime prosecutors have virtually dismantled the justice system in some jurisdictions by using their “discretion” not to prosecute thieves, drug dealers and violent criminals. Some prosecutors announced that they wouldn’t prosecute rioters and looters, others that they would stop prosecuting prostitution, public urination or thefts of under $1,000.

In the decade since Obama announced his exercise in prosecutorial discretion, the country has been overrun with criminals and illegal aliens who benefited from that “discretion”.

But prosecutorial discretion, like most leftist policies, works both ways.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg issued a ‘zero day’ memo on taking office that told prosecutors not to seek prison sentences for armed robbers. Bragg then labored to indict former President Trump while bypassing such niceties as the statute of limitations and the actual nature of the crime.

Such prosecutorial discretion has become routine in New York where Attorney General Letita James has championed criminal justice reform while targeting not only Trump, but the NRA. Bragg’s predecessor, DA Cyrus Vance, gave Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein a pass. He announced that he wouldn’t charge former Mayor Bill de Blasio, but pursued Trump. After refusing to charge BLM rioters or prostitutes, he made a point of dragging a woman featured in a viral video into court because she had called the police during a dispute with a black man.

But it’s also become normal at the federal level.

Hillary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information on a massive scale. The indictment of President Trump contrasts sharply with the treatment of Hillary, not to mention Biden who left classified documents lying around his garbage. The Trump team will argue selective prosecution, but the prosecution will argue that it can charge whom it pleases.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/06/11/tulsi-gabbard-trump-indictment-undermines-democracy-n1702331

“[The] Trump indictment undermines democracy because if a law is going to be enforced, it should be enforced equally and fairly across the board. The selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement to go after political or personal opponents, undermines the very essence of the rule of law, which is the foundation for our democracy,” ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard posted to her Locals account recently.

What Tulsi is touching on with the “selective use of govt institutions and law enforcement” is a phenomenon called anarcho-tyranny, in which politically favored individuals in the in-group are permitted to violate the letter of the law with impunity (a good example being the “mostly peaceful” “Summer of Love” 2020 BLM riots).

Meanwhile, under anarcho-tyranny, a robust enforcement regime is foisted upon members of the out-group (in the modern context consisting mostly of alt-right MAGA “domestic terrorists”). Law enforcement, in short, is entirely politicized.

While both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have admitted to housing classified documents illegally — neither of them even having a theoretical defense, as they were never president (at the time) and therefore have no authority to declassify anything — the DOJ has declined to pursue charges against either man because they are favored members of the ruling class in good standing.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/watch-trump-attorney-turns-tables-obliterates-sniveling-clinton/

Far-left ABC “News” anchor George Stephanopoulos’ attempt to corner Trump attorney Jim Trusty during their interview Friday went horribly wrong and the host went into meltdown mode as reported by the Daily Caller.

As Gateway Pundit readers know, Stephanopoulos is a former Democrat advisor who once served as Bill Clinton’s communications director before entering the media. He has carried water for his favored party since.

Stephanopoulos started his inquisition by trying to get Trusty to agree that Trump committed crimes. Trusty did not fall for the host’s trap, though, and completely turned the tables on him by pointing the actual serious crimes committed by Joe Biden.

Stephanopoulos lost his temper after getting hit with truth bombs. Trusty then finished him off in epic style.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

Stephanopoulos: Don’t you believe in the principle that no person is above the law?

Trusty: No person is below the law, that’s really the issue here. You’ve got these investigations in Delaware that are 1,000 times more serious by a sitting president who has authorized his DOJ to try to sink the candidacy of his prime opposition while that guy has unsecured documents that he stole out of a skiff dozens of years ago. Look, we’re not talking…

Stephanopoulos (melting down): What are you talking about? “What are you talking about? That is a ridiculous statement!

https://www.dailywire.com/news/time-to-just-say-no-to-george-soross-campaign-to-legalize-drugs

Eight of the nine 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls presented their vision for America in Iowa last Saturday. Yet, none proposed a policy that could stop or reverse the terrible effects caused by George Soros’s “compassionate” initiative of decriminalizing and legalizing drugs, which began with marijuana.

In his 2004 book “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” Soros stated: “When I decided to extend the operations of my Open Society Foundation to the United States, I chose drug policy as one of the first fields of engagement. I felt that drug policy was the area in which the United States was in the greatest danger of violating the principles of open society.”

Following Soros’s lead, marijuana campaigners claim that legalizing the drug is “a necessary social justice initiative” because, they say, marijuana use led to the mass incarceration of black and brown people. Thus, in addition to changing state laws to allow the use, possession, production, and selling of marijuana, provisions have been added to expunge and vacate low-level marijuana convictions.

Some states, like New Jersey, issued regulations to increase the number of cannabis businesses run by people with prior convictions for marijuana offenses, who were “most harmed by the failed war on drugs,” emphasizing that “social equity” does not necessarily include businesses owned by women, minorities, or disabled veterans.