RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dishonest-cancellation-campaign-against-ilya-shapiro/

Ilya Shapiro has been writing and speaking on the Supreme Court for the Cato Institute (where he ran the Cato Supreme Court Review), the Federalist Society, various conservative publications, and mainstream outlets such as guest blogging at SCOTUSBlog for years. His recent book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, is an excellent overview of the issue. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he has, over time, developed an essentially universal reputation for scholarly rigor and good humor, even when he lost his recent campaign for the school board in Falls Church, Va. It seems almost protesting too much to observe that neither I nor anybody else who knows Ilya has ever seen or heard him be anything but fair and decent towards people of all races and genders.

He has, however, done two things the Left will not easily forgive. One, consistent with his distaste for the anti-Jewish quotas his parents faced in the Soviet Union, he was an early supporter of the lawsuit against Harvard’s race discrimination against Asian Americans, a suit that has now reached the Supreme Court and has defenders of race discrimination scrambling for any weapon to hand to defend their practices. Two, just a week ago, Georgetown Law announced that it was hiring him to be executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Academic perches of that nature are seen by left-wingers as their exclusive province, and whenever a conservative or even a right-leaning libertarian gets hired into one, they immediately set out to get them fired by any means necessary.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/27/meet-the-capitol-polices-new-spy-chief/

When most Americans hear the term “Capitol Police,” they likely conjure visions of uniformed officers manning metal detectors at the numerous congressional buildings or helping tourists navigate the sprawling Capitol grounds: a D.C. version of a mall cop.

That imagery, however, is in stark contrast to reality as Democrats have weaponized yet another federal agency to target their political enemies on the Right. 

After January 6, 2021, Capitol Police officials announced plans to expand beyond the legislatively authorized purview of the agency and open offices in Florida and California, as well as in other states. Congress overwhelmingly supported a bill last year to fork over $2.1 billion in new funding to the Capitol Police. Now flush with cash and immune from any serious public oversight, the agency is returning the favor by spying on dissidents of the Biden regime.

According to Politico, Capitol Police investigators are preparing secret dossiers on lawmakers, congressional staff, donors, and even constituents who visit their representatives in public or in private. 

“After the Jan. 6 insurrection (sic), the Capitol Police’s intelligence unit quietly started scrutinizing the backgrounds of people who meet with lawmakers,” reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Daniel Lippman wrote. “Several Capitol Police intelligence analysts have already raised concerns about the practice to the department’s inspector general,” one source told Politico.

Investigators are asked to scour social media accounts and even examine “tax and real estate records to find out who owned the properties that lawmakers visited.” In one example, Capitol Police analyzed a fundraiser held in a private home for Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.). Donors to House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017, also are under Capitol police scrutiny.

Far from ensuring the safety of legislators and their staffs, the underlying political motive is obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention the past several years: the Capitol Police, acting as the Stasi of the Democratic Party, will collect dirt on Republicans under the pretense of national security then leak gossipy details to an always-compliant news media.

Journalists will then source the leaks to anonymous “intelligence officials” to legitimize any incriminating disclosures, which in turn will prompt Democrats to call for immediate investigations and criminal referrals—see the January 6 select committee for how this successful formula works.

In fact, an official from the Obama Administration, the birthplace of Russiagate and other political espionage efforts, is heading up the new endeavor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/a_virginia_delegates_speech_shows_republicans_are_learning_courage.html

Barack Obama broke most Republican politicians. It wasn’t anything he did. It was his skin color. No matter what Obama did, and no matter the substantive objections conservatives had to his policies and actions, the Democrat response was always the same: Racist. Ordinary people began to treat that mindless insult with the disdain it deserved. Politicians, however, grew cowed. That seems to be changing, perhaps because Democrat policies are proving so disastrous that calling critics is inadequate. Be that as it may, politicians are refusing to be silenced. Nick Freitas, a Virginia GOP member of the Virginia House of Delegates exemplifies this trend.

On Wednesday, Freitas, a former Green Beret, stood before the House of Delegates and, using a friendly tone and remarkably polite language, announced that he was no longer going to tolerate being called a bigot simply because he espoused different policies from Democrats. He tweeted a video of his statement which has been viewed over 553,000 times, which is pretty good if you’re not a Kardashian:

Freitas opens by noting that he has never personally attacked a member of the opposing party for policy differences. It’s quite different, though, when you’re on the Democrat side of the aisle:

I’m keeping a running tally so far of this session. We’re not very far into and almost every day, almost every day, someone on the other side of the aisle either gets up and either subtly, or comes right out and suggests, that if you don’t agree with them on policy, then you’re not a Christian, you’re a sexist, you’re a bigot, you’re a racist.

Indeed, right before Freitas stood up, Don Scott, a Democrat, gave a perfect example of that kind of personal attack over policy beliefs:

Freitas wrapped up his statement by making his position very clear:

Will I be nice this session? I’d certainly like to be. But I’m not about to sit here and listen to that [personal insults], Mr. Speaker, and then go home to my constituents and have them ask me, “Why didn’t you stand up and defend us?” So let’s have a robust policy discussion but, if you’re going to question the faith or the intentions of anybody that happens to disagree with you on policy, then you don’t get to lecture us on compassion, tolerance, or an open debate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/californias-diversity-psychosis-matthew-vadum/

A new California law known as AB 979 now forces the more than 600 publicly held corporations headquartered in the state to appoint board members based solely on their race and sexual orientation, whether real or imagined.

This law takes woke thinking to a whole new level by – for lack of a better way of putting it – perverting the already-perverse idea of identity politics. It does this by taking identity politics, which is already bad, and untethers it from actual group identities.

If wokeness is the flu, then this new, uniquely Californian approach to hyper-balkanizing America is flesh-eating disease.

Another state law, SB 826, already required that corporations meet a quota of female board members or face financial penalties. Existing law requires that by the end of 2019, a corporation with its principal executive office in the state had to have at least one female on its board. By the end of 2021, a corporation with 5 directors had to have a minimum of 2 female directors, and one with 6 or more directors had to have a least 3 female directors.

But as of this past December 31, the new law, known as AB 979, has required corporations to uphold an additional quota for board members based on race and sexual orientation, real or imagined. By the end of 2021, a corporation headquartered in the state was required to have at least one director from “an underrepresented community.” By the end of 2022, such a corporation with 5 to 8 directors had to have at least 2 directors from underserved communities; a corporation with 9 or more directors had to have a minimum of 3 directors from those communities on its board.

The statute codifies make-believe and guarantees legal uncertainty by not requiring the “director from an underrepresented community” to actually belong to that community.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/george-soros-funded-da-rationalizes-crime-wave-bruce-thornton/

Like other cities run by Democrats, Los Angeles is going through an epidemic of violent crime. Its Soros-funded DA George Gascón has a lot of blood on his hands for increasing the mayhem. When he was sworn in, he said his office would not prosecute a host of misdemeanor crimes, or seek the death penalty for even the most heinous murders. No surprise that, as Broken Windows policing confirmed nearly two decades ago, tolerating “non-violent” crimes has increased violent ones.

“The data,” as City Journal’s Soledad Ursúa, reports on LA, “show staggering surges of homicides, gun violence, and sexual assaults, and one can see with one’s own eyes the open-air drug scenes, rampant homelessness, streets lined with human excrement and needles, prostitution, filth, and squalor. Last year saw 52 percent more homicides than in 2019; shooting incidents were up 59 percent over the same period, according to the LAPD.” Much of this violence has come at the hands of street-bums and addicts.

In response to this carnage, Ursúa continues, Gascón has fallen back on old sociological nostrums about crime that blame everybody and everything except the criminal: “In many ways we cannot prosecute our way out of social inequalities, income inequalities, the unhoused, the desperation that we have.”

When it comes to crime, progressives who fancy themselves “brights” who just “follow the science,” are in fact slaves of some defunct sociologist.

But even before sociology and criminology became full-fledged “scientific” disciplines, this idea that crime was a response to an unjust social order could be found in popular novels in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A common theme of these thrillers was the role injustice played in driving the protagonist to crime.  Later, the new “science” of sociology turned this literary motif into a “scientific” explanation for crime, one that, as we are witnessing today, worsens the problem by distorting their causes, and abandoning both common sense and the moral imperative in a free society to hold people responsible for their actions.