If one judged only by Hollywood’s depiction of the American intelligence community, one could be forgiven for believing we are possessed of an awesome, best-in-class assembly of hackers, spies, gatekeepers and various assortment of keyboard warriors, all at the ready to break-in, shutdown and generally disrupt the digital machinations of our enemies.
It has happened again: A black man dies at the hands of white police officers, this time in Atlanta. Like clockwork, crowds gather, angry voices fill the air, mingling with the smoke of arson-lit fires. It’s another made-for-media performance of the nation’s race ritual, one that hardens hearts and betrays the dream of a colorblind society that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. held so dear. An altogether different rite is playing out across America, though. And over time, it cannot but extinguish the hatred: interracial and interethnic marriage.
There are places on the planet where the natural urge for free expression is not allowed. The United States has never been one of those forbidding spots -- until now. Like a smoldering match dropped too close to a gas pump, the inexcusable police killing of a black man has blown racial sensitivities sky high. The resulting concussion has stripped away the great American tradition of searching for a pathway to peace through reasoned discussion, replacing it with robotic recognition of "systemic racism." So much for unfettered speech in "the land of the free."
Cities thrive because they are centers of human activity. Cities decay for the same reason -- because they are centers of human activity. The difference between urban growth and shrinkage is the nature of the human activity. The quality of life their major cities offer is no longer sufficient that Americans are proud to call them "home." Sadly, the outbreak of twin scourges of disease and anarchy is hastening the hollowing out of the nation's population centers. It's an ugly black eye for blue leadership, which is to say, the Democratic Party.
Among the most admired men and women in America today are our technical experts. They tend to reside in Silicon Valley or Boston, and even in The Washington Times' own backyard, Montgomery County, Maryland. They work in bits and bytes, and are given over to making astounding pronouncements on seemingly-miraculous health cures, colonizing the outer galaxies of the Milky Way, advanced weapons systems and uploading our consciousness onto computers to achieve immortality.
Whether we're experiencing the beginnings of a period of profound social change or witnessing the effects of the long lockdown hangover, it's time someone stood in the middle of the public square and shouted "Enough!" at the top of their lungs.
The political winds have shifted in Washington. The law enforcers who abused their badges to launch a political inquisition targeting Donald Trump are themselves now exposed to the furies they unleashed. It's poetic justice -- without the poetry. The process may be painful, but the nation is less likely to suffer a coup redo if the instigators have their cover-up blown.
On Sunday, as the hour approached midnight, and right around the time the destruction and looting of Washington reached a pitch that would find the historic 200-year-old St. John's Episcopal Church (among many other places throughout the United States) across from the White House desecrated and set fire, American Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley were docking with the International Space Station.
The mask is off. Followers of the political left indoctrinated to believe America was conceived in oppression have dropped their pretense of crusading to create a more perfect union. Always on the scout for a means with which to dismantle America, they have opted for the most direct ploy yet: Light the match of racial strife and burn it down. They won't succeed, though, because hundreds of millions of citizens see through the charade and won't stand for their malice.
Last week, for the first time in the history of the social media platform, Twitter added a fact-checking warning label to two of President Trump's tweets regarding mail-in voting and fraud. Twitter's link at the bottom of the president's posts were meant to signal to the public that the information sent out was, by their lights, factually inaccurate.
The Trump-Russia collusion ruse has been unraveled, proven false and buried in the annals of dirty politics, except for one dangling strand -- the relentless persecution of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn that masquerades as legitimate prosecution. Knowing that a nation can't long endure without respect for justice, judges with the authority to intervene should gavel the case to a close.
The coronavirus has been a killer of the conventional. Even as health dangers diminish, pressure is building for a radical shift in long-standing custom for the way the nation elects its leaders. Vote-by-mail may be a common-sense method of avoiding the risk of infection amid busy polling stations for the most vulnerable, but staking the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on postal proficiency is reckless.
Aside from the prospect of getting to choose a replacement for octogenarian liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, furthering a much-needed makeover of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals might well be the single most compelling reason to reelect President Trump in November.
Americans were not meant to sit on their hands with their feet up on the coffee table. Our forebears of more than 10 generations took leaps of faith -- some by ship, some by foot and some by airplane -- all to light upon a new land where they could chase their wildest dreams. A new chapter in the story of the nation's journey begins Wednesday when a fresh generation of spacecraft, labeled "Made in America," lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. New adventures and opportunities await, somewhere out there.
So, let's call the 1619 Project and its use in our public schools what it is: An attempt to brainwash children into believing the historical narrative Mrs. Hannah-Jones and The New York Times want them to believe.
