Good morning. Welcome to Big Jim’s Joltateria. My name is Jack and I will be your waiter. Before I show you the menu of range-free, locally grown, organic, artisan NRO selections, let me tell you about today’s special:
My friend Anne Sorock, who runs The Frontier Lab (I am on the board; TFL uses corporate-marketing and consumer-analysis techniques and methods, and applies them to political situations, social movements, and key issues in order to find the deeply held values which motivate them), has a new video out today about Black Lives Matter that shows how this particular movement is truly a tool of far-left activists hellbent on creating a large social divide in America. Per Anne:
Organizers of Black Lives Matter who participated in our study were almost wholly unconcerned with furthering issues important to aiding the Black community in America. Instead, movement operatives see victory for a decades-long struggle to divide Americans into ‘haves and have-nots’ within reach, more tangibly, for the first time in many of their lifetimes.
Anne’s ongoing study of BLM – its players, its mission, the consequences – includes this fascinating 2016 document, The Privileged and the Oppressed: Progressives’ Latest Narrative, Revealed Through Black Lives Matter. Among its key finding is this: “Black Lives Matter’s core message is built upon, depends upon, and has as its ultimate goal, the larger retelling of the American story as one of oppression and racism.” I suggest you watch the video and read the report.
Now, here are six NRO selections that should meet everyone’s tastes.
1. On the question of Confederate statues, Kevin Williamson echoes Paul McCartney and says Let It Be. From his piece:
The Democrats’ motives here are tawdry and self-serving, for the most part. As cheap and silly as Southern sentimentality can be, the desire to reduce and humiliate one’s fellow citizens is distasteful. We would all do better to take Abraham Lincoln’s advice: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Friends overlook one another’s little vices.
And friends do not terrorize one another by torchlight. Republicans would do well to remember what the alternative to being the party of Lincoln really is.
2. Victor Davis Hanson calls phony on progressives who give endless free passes to Silicon Valley robber barons. Read his excellent piece. I love the last line: “Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.”
3. How about four ways of getting out of President Obama’s insane nuke deal with Iran? Well, Matthew R.J. Brodsky suggests them.
4. No, Piers Morgan and other chooches, there is not a Nazi exemption to America’s free speech protection. American wannabe Charlie Cooke explains it brilliantly.
5. Speaking of Charlie . . . speaking of Kevin . . . you may want to listen to the most recent episode of the popular Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast, in which the dynamic duo talk about the “Google Memo” and Rep. Kathleen Rice’s disgraceful comments about the NRA.
6. It is always welcome to get a reminder, as Greg Jones does wonderfully, of the brutal consequences of leftist economics at home and abroad.
Sparkling or tap? Good. I’ll be back shortly with your bread.
Until tomorrow,
Jack Fowler
P.S.: The theme song that’s been quickly adopted by statues everywhere: Take it away Helen Reddy.