RUTHFULLY YOURS

Claudia Rosett’s Wonderful Life

She started at age seven, serving tea and cookies to Milton and Rose Friedman, and rose to cover our political economy — and dodge machine gun fire to walk among the protesters at Tiananmen Square.

The death Saturday of Claudia Rosett takes, at age 67, not only a treasured friend and colleague but also one of her generation’s greatest journalists. She came up through the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, served a tour as its Moscow bureau chief and another as editorial page editor of its edition in Asia, where she covered, among other things, the Communist Chinese massacre at Tiananmen Square.

One of the things that made Claudia Rosett such a strong journalist — aside from her brilliance and passion for principles — was her mastery of political economy. She’d imbibed this at the knee of her father, Richard, dean of the University of Chicago’s business school and a free-market sage. At the age of seven, she took tea with Milton and Rose Friedman, to whom she served cookies. She mixed all that with a major in English literature at Yale — and her own true grit.

“Some people sail through in this great golden glow,” she once told the Hillsdale Collegian. “That wasn’t me. You just keep writing and you keep asking people for work.” She got an internship at the Journal, and “when that didn’t lead to a full-time job on staff,” she said, “I just began writing wherever I could … It was just going in, asking if they needed something or if I could write something for them. And just keep writing.”

https://victorhanson.com/ossified-americana-part-one/

Here are a few institutions that have quite outlived their age.

Tribal Graduations

Consider 40 percent of California’s population now identifies as Latino, predominately Mexican American. Fifty percent of current BAs in the California State University system this year were awarded to self-described Latinos.

That paradox brings up the question, why are there Chicano/Latino separate graduate ceremonies at CSU when the Latino community is both the largest ethnic group in the state and graduates the greatest percentage of students at CSU?

Many of the Latino graduates are children of mixed marriages and do not speak English. If someone does not speak Spanish and has three grandfathers who are so-called Anglo and one Argentinian grandparent, is he allowed to participate?

Such absurd questions arise anytime we revert to tribalism, as we saw with the desperate but ultimately successful efforts of Elizabeth Warren to high-cheekbone her way into a Harvard Law professorship.

I think the prior arguments for ethnic theme houses and segregated graduations were predicated on victimized “minority status”—i.e., “marginalized peoples” who need the resonance of ethnic solidarity or indeed chauvinism to fend off various perceived threats from the majority.

But is that premise any longer valid in 2023?

What exactly is the point of a racially segregated graduation ceremony when your particular tribe is the largest in the state and the university?

Was the current practice and idea of segregated dorms and graduations a universal one or simply ad hoc to be used in particular advantageous situations?

That is, if there were a white dorm or “European-American theme house,” and a white graduation ceremony to incur “ethnic pride” and to foster “solidarity”—borrowing the protocols from the former Latino minority—would the Latino academic establishment say either “Congratulations that you followed our precedent and let us know how we can help to advise you on instilling ethnic pride in your heritage and confidence that you are vigilant against systemic bias and prejudice” or “You are flat out racists and have no business emulating the segregationist practices of the Old South”?

Then we come to the mechanics of tribal selection and qualification, a contentious process as we have learned from fierce in-fighting among tribal casino gambling enclaves.

 Godspeed to all who choose to serve and protect America. Every year I read  General Douglas MacArthur’s most inspiring speech. He wrote every word himself. No one has said it better. rsk

General Douglas MacArthur’s Farewell Speech to West Point

General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps. As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, “Where are you bound for, General?” and when I replied, “West Point,” he remarked, “Beautiful place, have you ever been there before?”

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily for a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code – the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.  

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/28/the-politics-of-inertia/

Has something finally intervened to change the 2024 calculus?

“Inertia” is an interesting word. It comes from the Latin iners, which means, first of all, “without skill,” “incompetent” (in, not + ars, art, skill). But it also means “sluggish,” “weak,” “inactive,” “motionless.” In common speech, “inertia” generally suggests something torpid, sleepy, without spunk or initiative. “Joe wanted to go to the race but was overcome by inertia and stayed home.” 

But there is another, more potent sense of “inertia” in common usage. It is implicit in the definition Newton gives in his first law of motion. Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare. “Every body preserves its state of rest or uniform movement in a straight line unless forced to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” 

Newton was thinking of the physical world. But we can observe something similar in the social world and the world of politics. Once a trend or tendency has been achieved, it continues on course until something intervenes to stop or alter its direction. 

Consider the Biden Administration. Once achieved, it lumbered on. Joe Biden’s incontinent glossolalia didn’t matter, nor did his signal failure at the southern border, with energy policy, or with the economy. The communicable mind-virus of wokeness may have reached epidemic proportions in the corporate world, in government agencies, even in the U.S. military, but the blind trajectory set by Biden’s autopilot just barreled on through, unhindered. 

Has something finally intervened to change things? Maybe. In substance, it is just the same thing we’ve seen many times before: allegations about Joe Biden’s involvement with his son Hunter’s shady business dealing. Tucker Carlson, among others, detailed these allegations in technicolor. Back in October 2020—note the date—Carlson interviewed Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. It was an extraordinary, and extraordinarily damaging, interview. 

Or so one would have thought. As I noted at the time, Bobulinski “laid out the entire bizarre story of his association with the Bidens, including two face-to-face meetings with Joe Biden in the company of his brother and son.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/28/it-was-always-only-about-power-with-the-left/

Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? 

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it. 

Spout racialist nonsense for 40 years? Harass women and young girls by blowing in their hair and squeezing them too tightly? Create a family grifting syndicate to leverage foreign cash in quid pro quo fashion? Praise racial segregationists?  

Joe Biden did all those things and more. But he also did them in service to a supposed noble cause, sort of like the current board president of the NAACP promoting a black travel ban on Florida, while he lives—in Florida!

Keep political utility in mind and the baffling hypocrisy of the Left makes all too perfect sense. 

January 6 vs. the “Summer of Love” 

From all the tens of thousands of January 6 Capitol protesters a small percentage entered the Capitol itself. Of that group, an even smaller number committed violent acts. Most of those seriously injured that day were among the protesters themselves. Despite official propaganda, there were not five police officers killed on January 6 as alleged by the Left. 

Instead, the only likely death at the hand of another was the diminutive, 5’2’’, 14-year-military veteran and unarmed Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol officer Michael Byrd for the likely misdemeanor of trespassing and—illegally entering a broken window to the Capitol.  

Yet over a thousand protesters were arrested, tried, and mostly convicted of various charges from parading without a permit to insurrection. Many of them were sentenced to long prison sentences. Some may spend most of their remaining lives in prison.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19677/end-of-free-speech

[M]edia polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official “truth.”

Americans have correctly concluded that [with the “Russia Hoax” and suppressing reported influence peddling in Hunter Biden’s laptop ] journalists and spies advanced a “fraud” on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and “help Biden win.” Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited “fake news.”

“Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.” — Professor Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School, Twitter, May 15, 2023.

The government apparently took the public’s censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a “disinformation governance board” within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new “disinformation” office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from “foreign” threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control “public opinion and behaviors.”

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government’s resurrected Ministry of Truth: “It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets.”

Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with “the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research.”

Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication. Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government’s First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission’s crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting “wrongthink,” or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually “domestic terrorists” in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the “enemy,” there is no telling who will be designated as a “threat” and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

If Schwab’s online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk’s appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a “neo-liberal wokeist” with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official “snitch lines,” censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected “disinformation governance board,” and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it.