RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-indicts-the-minneapolis-police-11619045332?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Derek Chauvin awaits his murder sentence at a Minnesota Correctional Facility, yet the federal government spared hardly a moment before shifting its scrutiny toward his former colleagues. A new Justice Department probe of the Minneapolis Police Department is targeting the city’s officers in an effort to prove the Democratic narrative of “systemic” police racism.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday announced a pattern-or-practice investigation of Minneapolis police. Federal investigators in coming months will examine the department’s record and policing methods. If they find behavior they dislike, they have the power to force reform of the department through a consent decree. Mr. Garland referred to the process as a matter of straightforward oversight, saying “good officers welcome accountability.”

Yet Minneapolis police are right to suspect that Washington is probing them with a foregone conclusion. In his address after Mr. Chauvin’s conviction Tuesday, President Biden said his Administration’s next step would be “confronting head-on systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing.” The man who drafted the 1994 crime bill that led to the arrest of countless black drug users is now claiming racism is endemic among American police.

Last May then-Attorney General William Barr launched a federal civil-rights probe into the death of George Floyd in police custody, and that investigation continues. But Democrats are now expanding the charge of wrongdoing to the entire department, seeking proof that Mr. Chauvin’s actions represent the culture of policing today. No matter that the Minneapolis police chief since 2017, Medaria Arradondo, testified for the prosecution in the Chauvin trial and has pushed to reform certain police practices like choke holds.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/21/how-much-ruin-do-we-have-left/

As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation’s well-being hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability. A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.

Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders.

The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy.

Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt.

The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The greater problem lies within us, as we erode the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually.

We are now witnessing a concentrated effort to alter the constitutional order and centuries of custom and tradition. The left believes that’s the only way it can retain its transient power, given the unpopularity of most of its current agenda.

A nation’s institutions are its bedrock. Yet, the Electoral College and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual states establishing voting laws are under assault.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/21/why-a-free-people-cannot-exist-without-free-speech/

Free speech is perhaps the most important liberty Americans enjoy. People exercise it every day without even thinking about it, and for good reason it is mentioned in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But free speech is more than just the words in the Bill of Rights. Before there was a law, there was the idea of free speech. The law limits the government to protect the right, but does not define the right.

More than simply a legal issue, free speech is a part of American culture—an important distinction. If free speech meant only the words in the Constitution, if all it guaranteed were that the government could not jail us for our words, it would be a dead letter. Governments across the world guarantee rights in their laws yet violate them daily.

Indeed, free speech was not invented in 1791. The law only codifies what the Founders and their contemporaries already believed: that a free people must be allowed to openly express themselves, and that the cure for bad ideas is good ideas, not censorship.

The First Amendment is essential, but the American people believe in the principle of free speech. That includes more than just being free of government punishment. It includes the idea that no power — be it government, corporation, or mob — should be able to suppress the free exchange of ideas.

We often speak of the “marketplace of ideas,” and just as with markets for goods, the concept came first, and laws to protect it followed. Now, the concept is under threat. Should it fail, and should deplatforming, monopoly pressures, and “heckler’s vetoes” become accepted practices, then no matter what the law says, free speech as a concept will die.

The English Roots of Free Speech

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/21/the_long_arm_of_the_law_reaches_into_your_cellphone.html

Bob Goodlatte (R) represented Virginia’s 6th Congressional District, served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and is senior policy adviser of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.Alex Marthews is the national chair of Restore the Fourth, an advocacy organization dedicated to privacy, surveillance reform and the Fourth Amendment.

Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, the government may be tricking your cellphone into divulging your movements, while seeing who you’ve texted and called.

Since 1995, local and state governments, as well as federal agencies, have been using “cell site simulators,” commonly known by the genericized brand name “stingrays.” These portable devices collect data from the cellphones of anyone who happens to walk into range of its signals.

Stingrays work by mimicking cellphone towers, sending signals to trick phones in a targeted area into transmitting the locations and identifying information from bystanders. Stingrays represent one of the largest bulk data collection programs in the United States, operating at all levels of government.

According to a 2018 American Civil Liberties Union investigation, at least 75 agencies in 27 states and the District of Columbia owned stingrays, with the potential to compromise the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans. When asked about stingrays, many law enforcement officials obfuscate. A police department in Florida admitted in emails to hiding its use of a stingray-type device. Often, the manufacturers of these devices, and sometimes the FBI, require police departments to sign non-disclosure agreements. Federal law enforcement will often push for dismissal of cases rather than reveal specifics about how these devices are used. In 2018, the ACLU reported that 14 federal agencies were known to utilize stingrays, including IRS, ICE and the FBI.

The decentralized nature of this technology makes investigation difficult. Hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests would need to be filed to uncover the scope of their use – and even then, past experience suggests these requests would often be ignored.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/04/21/eric_kaufmann_media_dems_ignore_facts_and_logic_as_they_push_racial_division.html

University of London professor Eric Kaufmann argues that media coverage of police brutality has steered people away from numbers and statistics on “FOX News Primetime.”

ERIC KAUFMANN: What this study finds is that people’s perception of racism and the reality of racism has been diverging, especially the past five years or so. So for example, what you see in the major newspapers like “The New York Times” or “The Washington Post,” there has been an explosion of the terms racist, white privilege, white supremacy, and so on, and that has been documented in terms of word counts.

That seems correlated with a big shift to the left in terms of, particularly white liberal attitudes on race. And what that seems to produce is a big, big distortion, again, of people’s perception of the size of this problem.

To give you a concrete example rooted in indisputable fact, I asked the question in my survey to both black and white respondents, what is more, which is the more likely cause of death for a young black man in America? Is it a car accident or is it to be shot by the police? It is a clear fact that it is about 10-1 with car accidents over a police bullet, and yet eight-in-ten African-American Biden voters and seven-in-ten whites who believe… white Republicans are racist actually said it was police that were more likely to be the cause of death for young black men. So this is leading people to have a distorted picture of reality. And that feeds into a whole series of political attitudes.

BEN DOMENECH: You know, Eric, I think this is a situation where so much of the media conversation, the focus on these stories, which are truly tragic and terrifying and horrible, has created this outsized feeling that this is something that happens on a daily basis in America. We have heard from the president tonight about systemic racism being this virulent strain that runs through American life.

What can be done to reset this and try to get back to what the facts actually are about the level of this problem in America?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-activists-politicians-ignore-evidence-rush-to-conclusions-in-makhia-bryant-shooting/

Hours after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on Tuesday, media and activists tried to cram the police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant into a pre-ordained narrative box, taking advantage of the incident’s proximity to Chauvin’s conviction to cast the shooting of an armed teenager, who was in the act of stabbing someone, as yet another example of the kind of brutality visited upon George Floyd.

Columbus police responded to a 911 call on Tuesday evening to find a group of teenage girls in a physical altercation in a suburban front yard. Body-camera footage shows that an unnamed officer exited his vehicle and commanded the brawling girls to “get down” before shooting 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant four times. Freeze-frame images  show that Bryant was swinging her knife toward another African-American girl in a pink sweatsuit as she was shot.

“She had a knife. She just ran at her,” the officer can be heard saying.

Hazel Bryant, who identified herself as the victim’s aunt, confirmed to The Columbus Dispatch that her niece did have a knife, but said she dropped it before being shot — an anecdote picked up and widely reported by national media, including the New York Times, before the body-camera footage had been released.

Columbus mayor Andrew J. Ginther, a Democrat, called the events “a horrible, heartbreaking situation” in a press conference, adding that the footage was quickly released in the interest of “transparency.”

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/04/21/packing-the-court-then-and-now/

Not every war is won on the battlefield or ends with a surrender ceremony. Some are won quietly, sometimes before the killing starts, when the weaker side backs down because it expects to lose. The victory is achieved by intimidation and credible threats.

That is exactly what happened with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme in 1937. Unfortunately, the nature of his victory, and even the fact that he won, is widely misunderstood. Most commentators blathering on TV or the internet about current court-packing proposals actually think Roosevelt lost because he failed to add additional justices to the Supreme Court.

In fact, the president won because he got what he really cared about: acceptance of his major policy initiatives as constitutionally proper. The sitting justices listened to FDR’s threats, recognized his enormous political power after a sweeping election victory, and caved in. Then, one by one, the most conservative justices retired, allowing Roosevelt to reshape the court without adding to the existing nine members.

Why does Roosevelt’s victory still matter? For two reasons. First, it matters because progressives are trying to pack the court once again. And although their effort is unlikely to succeed (as they now realize), it is animated by the hope that, once again, the threat of court-packing will intimidate sitting justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, who has repeatedly shown he wants to avoid any conflict with the president or Congress. The recent clamor could also intimidate President Biden’s new judicial commission, pushing its members to recommend packing the lower courts. (More on that later.)

Second, it matters because Roosevelt’s court-packing episode was crucial to the reconfiguration of American politics, particularly the growth of the centralized state. That growth was only possible because the Supreme Court bent to Roosevelt’s demands and approved his regulatory programs. No issue is more important today. That is especially true now that the Biden administration is attempting yet another vast extension of federal power, the largest since President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s.