RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-battle-for-cultural-survival

Anyone with even a glancing exposure to the media over the past several years knows that conservatives are waging a “culture war.” Republicans have been advocating and all too often implementing hurtful changes to settled social arrangements, proclaim the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets on a near-daily basis. This culture war arises primarily out of “hate and fear,” according to President Joe Biden, but pecuniary motives play a role as well, as GOP operatives try to stir up the base and shake it down for donations.

Coverage of this alleged culture war demonstrates the Left’s most important power: the ability to set the default. The Left engineers disruption after disruption to longstanding social practices, each more sweeping than the last. And as soon as those changes are in place, they become the norm, treated as having existed from time immemorial. Questioning that new default is painted as churlish and radical. The Left never has to meet a burden of proof to implement its changes; the burden falls exclusively on conservatives seeking to restore a once-uncontroversial tradition. Though conservatives are portrayed as the aggressors, in reality they are always on the defensive, fighting a rearguard action.

Default-setting shows up across the cultural landscape, whether regarding the requirement that college faculty swear fealty to racial preferences (a.k.a. “diversity”) as a condition of employment, or regarding the introduction of politicized concepts such as “intersectionality” and white privilege into the K-12 curriculum. Its most stunning instantiation, however, is transgender ideology.

The trans revolution has unfolded in a micro percentage of a nanosecond in the context of millions of years of human development. It has introduced ideas that would have been incomprehensible to every previous generation of humanity, whether they found themselves on the African, Asian, American, or European continents. As recently as the 1980s, “trans issues” had not surfaced even among gender theorists themselves, according to the field’s progenitor, Judith Butler.

But now that academic gender theorists have managed to infiltrate their startling creed into virtually every mainstream American institution, contradicting millennia of human experience and centuries of scientific confirmation of that experience, any dissent from the new default is portrayed as a war against the natural order of things, branding the dissenters as hateful and even homicidal.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/04/yes_virginia_america_really_is_a_good_country_

Every year at Christmastime, news sites reprint the touching letter from a little girl, Virginia O’Hanlon, asking about Santa Claus and the columnist’s reassuring, fatherly response. He doesn’t smack her with the hard fact that Santa is a fictional creation. He points toward a deeper truth about our shared celebrations and the web of fond memories that bind together generations of children, parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents.

As we celebrate this Independence Day, we desperately need to remember our own shared beliefs and ideals in hopes they will bind together our divided nation. Our shared ideals and common identity as Americans should bind us. Today, alas, they are too frayed to do the job. Some think it is a fraud even to stress those commonalities.

It is not. Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/03/the-bidens-existential-threats-to-the-american-rule-of-law/

President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law.

They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance.

Our tax institutions, of course, are based on the real deterrence of a disinterested, uncompromised Internal Revenue Service. Without it, the income revenues of the United States are existentially threatened.

So far, any negative reputation of the IRS has rested with natural complaints that it is too zealous in hounding out American taxpayers in all walks of life. Or citizens often object that the IRS must enforce a tax code that is innately unfair.

But not until now, has the IRS itself ever been under a shadow of such corruption?

Has it been in the past ever found to have applied so blatantly and deliberately one standard of tax enforcement to elites and quite another to everyday Americans?

Again, if that charge of unequal treatment in tax compliance were to prove true, then Humpy-Dumpty like, the entire American system of revenue collection would shatter.

In other words, millions of Americans might shrug, “If Joe Biden, President of the United States and his criminally minded son, can get away with avoiding millions of dollars in taxes, then should not I, a nobody, at least have the right to avoid hundreds of dollars in taxes?”

So the Bidens, along with Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI, are treading on dangerous ground in imperiling a hallowed American tradition—one vital to the very governance and operation of the United States.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/03/what-the-fourth-of-july-was-not/

Our national Fourth of July holiday—currently the nation’s 247th since the first in 1776—marks the birth of the United States.

The iconic Declaration of Independence was published on the 4th and largely written by Thomas Jefferson. Its core sentence would become among the most famous words in American history:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those aspirations at the outset pledged the new American nation to hold to its promises “that all men are created equal.”

In other words, so-called white males established a foundational document whose inherent logic was that the millions of Americans not yet born—who would not necessarily look like them, or share their ancestry—would become their political equals.

Most nation founders do not envision the future of their country in terms that might not privilege those of their own tribe.

In contrast, today it would be difficult for a foreign national to become a full-fledged Chinese, Mexican, or Iranian citizen, with full equal rights, who either did not look like, or embrace a religion different from, the majority population.

What followed from the Declaration was a constant demand from many quarters for America to live up to its own exalted words.

Eighty-five years later, that promise culminated in a horrific Civil War that cost 700,000 American lives to remove the stain of slavery, and to honor the promise of the Fourth.

“All men are created equal” further entailed another century of protest and reform, until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s finally enshrined into law equality of opportunity statutes.

But note what the Declaration was not.

There was no full embrace of all the later French Revolutionary slogans of Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Instead, the Declaration promised that all men should start out equally through guaranteed protections to live their lives as they please and ensure their liberty.

https://victorhanson.com/poking-the-snoring-conservative-dragon-part-two/

In 2024, the Left will spend $4-5 billion on the presidential and congressional races, with another $4-5 billion in free advertising in propaganda from network news, PBS, NPR, and the Silicon Valley mob. The latter again will do their leftist best, from rigging the order of Google searches, to banning supposed “misinformation” and “disinformation” from non-Twitter social media, to blacklisting traffickers in “hate speech” who might critique Democratic candidates.

The only remedy would be millions of poll watchers to turn out on Election Day 2024. The Right must draft legions of lawyers right now to ensure balloting laws are not massaged by leftist activist lawyers and judges.

There must be a rare conservative mass get-out-the-vote effort (i.e., mail-in and early balloting), targeted at rest homes and retirement communities. Republicans, until they restore integrity to balloting, must bring Barack Obama’s proverbial “gun to a knife fight” (a phrase Obama stole from David Mamet’s screenplay of The Untouchables) determination not to keep losing, and master third-party vote harvesting and ballot curing.

The Left does not have the numbers (look at the poor poll numbers on every of Joe Biden’s current policies), but neither do conservatives—unless they organize and trump the tactics of the Left. (No, I am not suggesting protestors mass outside Hunter Biden’s house in the fashion leftists swarm with impunity the homes of Supreme Court justices in felonious, but exempt, efforts to intimidate them into rendering more favorable opinions.)

But there are things the Right can do, if it wishes to stop losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (George W. Bush’s razor-thin 2004 being the outlier)—and finally for the first time in 36 years win 51% of the popular vote, as George H.W. Bush last managed in 1988 against a weak Mike Dukakis.

So what would an aroused dragon do?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19759/colorblind-society

Although this decision was split along current conservative-liberal lines, with the court’s three liberals dissenting, it actually reflects traditional liberalism. Justice William Douglas, perhaps the most liberal justice in Supreme Court history, advocated precisely this race neutral approach when affirmative action was first introduced. He was right then, and his liberal, colorblind approach, has now been vindicated.

A simple example demonstrates why employing race as a criteria is both unconstitutional and immoral. As the Supreme Court correctly pointed out, admission to elite universities is a zero-sum game: for every student or group that is given preference, another is disadvantaged. So consider this zero-sum choice:….

After decades of vacillation, the Supreme Court of the United States has finally and firmly declared that the Constitution does not permit publicly funded universities to consider race, as such, in its admission processes. This is a decision that many, including this author, have been advocating since the 1970s, when my first law review article appeared, calling for affirmative action to be based on non-racial criteria and individual accomplishments.

The Supreme Court has been moving in this direction for some time now, but it has until now allowed loopholes the size of university football stadiums. These loopholes were exploited by universities to enforce quota systems whereby approximately the same percentage of minority applicants would be admitted every year. The results of these quotas impacted most heavily on one of the most discriminated against groups in American history – Asian Americans. The plaintiffs in the Harvard case were such Americans. It will be interesting to see how their numbers are affected by the decision.