RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/cultural-revolutions-start-year-zero/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

E very cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time.

Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. Or at least we were told that — in part by Black Lives Matter, in part by Antifa, in part by terrified enablers in the corporate world, the new Democratic Party, the military, the universities, and the media.

What was uniquely different about this cultural revolution was how willing and quickly the entire progressive establishment — elected officials, celebrities, media, universities, foundations, retired military — was either on the side of the revolution or saw it as useful in aborting the Trump presidency, or was terrified it would be targeted and so wished to appease the Jacobins.

This reborn America was to end all of the old that had come before and supposedly pay penance for George Floyd’s death and, by symbolic extension, America’s inherent evil since 1619. As in all cultural revolutions, the protestors claimed at first at that they wanted only to erase supposedly reactionary elements: Confederate statues, movies such as Gone with the Wind, some hurtful cartoons, and a few cranky conservative professors and what not.

But soon such recalibration steam rolled, fueled by acquiescence, fright, and timidity. Drunk with ego and power, it moved on to attack almost anything connected with the past or present of the United States itself.

Soon statues of General Grant, and presidents including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson were either toppled or defaced. The message was that their crimes were being white and privileged — in the way that today’s white and privileged should meet a similar fate. Or, as the marchers, who tried to storm Beverly Hills, put it: “Eat the Rich.” They were met by tear gas, and not a single retired general double-downed on his outrage at law enforcement for using tear gas against civilians. Did the BLM idea of cannibalizing the billionaires include LeBron James, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, and likely soon-to-be billionaire Barack Obama?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-court-upholds-trump-exemptions-to-obamacare-contraceptive-mandate-for-now/

A victory for the Little Sisters of the Poor, but the case will drag on.

The Supreme Court has upheld the Trump administration’s exemptions to mandatory contraception coverage under Obamacare for employers with sincerely held objections. The ruling is welcome, particularly in its recognition that First Amendment religious liberty is not confined to identifiably religious organizations, such as churches, but to all Americans. Regrettably, however, the justices stopped short of a definitive ruling that would end the litigation, which the Little Sisters of the Poor have had to pursue for seven long years.

That explains the seemingly lopsided 7–2 decision in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded that the Trump administration had the authority under the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to issue the exemptions. Justice Thomas rejected the objecting states’ claims that the exemptions were not permitted under the ACA; and that, even if they were permitted, the administration had failed to comply with technical notice-and-commentary requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. (Interestingly, such technical APA flaws were Chief Justice John Roberts’s rationale for joining the Court’s four-justice left-wing bloc to invalidate the administration’s rescission of the Obama DACA decree — notwithstanding that the Obama administration had not complied with the APA in promulgating DACA.)

The Court’s ruling is fine as far as it goes. Nevertheless, Thomas reasoned that because the case could be decided based on the terms of the Obamacare statute itself, the Court need not reach the closely related question of whether the contraceptive mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014), the Court had held that the contraceptive mandate unduly burdened the free exercise rights of closely held corporations with sincerely held religious objections.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16206/farrakhan-threats

For anyone who has followed Farrakhan’s hate-filled career — praising Hitler, calling Jews termites, calling Judaism a gutter religion, attacking gays — the content of any Farrakhan speech comes as no surprise.

Farrakhan — like Nazis and Communists — has a First Amendment right to tell his lies and spread his hate. But no media has an obligation to promote or disseminate his bigotry.

Nor does it demand silence from responsible Black and Muslim leaders, whose voices should be heard condemning Farrakhan’s devaluation of Jewish lives, gay lives, and the lives of people suffering from Covid-19.

Under the principles espoused in Brandenburg v Ohio and other leading cases, “advocacy” of violence is constitutionally protected but not “incitement ” to “Imminent lawless action.” The line between advocacy and incitement has not always been easy to draw.

In his July 4th hate-filled anti-American rant, Louis Farrakhan singled out this author for condemnation and threats for writing an article urging people to take a Covid-19 vaccine if a safe an effective one were developed.

The article also stated that mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of a highly contagious lethal disease was held constitutional by the Supreme Court and would likely be upheld by the current Court. This comment led Farrakhan to say the following:

“So Mr. Dershowitz, if you bring the vaccine and say you’re going to bring your army to force us to take it, once you try to force us, that’s a declaration of war on all of us. You only have this one life; fight like hell to keep it and fight like hell to destroy those whose heart and mind is to destroy you and take your life from you.”