RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/10/the-story-of-the-ranchers-businesses-and-people-in-the-only-state-to-not-shut-down/

‘If you have a leader that will take too much authority in a time of crisis, that’s when we lose our freedom and our liberties,’ said Gov. Kristi Noem.

The story below is the fifth in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns and threats of rioting, and what they’re doing to survive. Over two weeks, The Federalist traveled the country to tell stories like this one.

In South Dakota, the only state in the union to never enforce a government-mandated shutdown, we spoke with cowboys, ranchers, steakhouse owners, hotel managers, great grandparents, actors, bartenders, and even the governor to learn the state of American business. We heard of their successes and perils, those who hadn’t made it and those who still might not.

SOUTH DAKOTA — It’s a long, beautiful haul, driving across Wyoming. Pulling out of Jackson Hole, along the storied Snake River, past Grand Teton Mountain and up into the north. It’s nearly 60 degrees in the town below, but up here the snow is falling fast.

Then it’s back down the mountains into the high desert. Towns of less than 50 residents dot the hills below distant snow-capped peaks. The first sign we’ve entered the Wind River Reservation is a black-haired woman stumbling barefoot from a bathroom outside a gas station, eyes wide, red bandanna tourniquet still tied around her sagging bicep. That and the low price on tobacco.

America’s reservations, already suffering from heightened rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse and poverty, have been especially hard hit in the economic shutdown.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/10/new-russiagate-subpoenas-probe-depths-of-obama-administration-corruption-in-flynn-ambush/

Details released over the last month reveal Obama and Biden knew more about the Michael Flynn ambush than previously realized. New subpoenas of Susan Rise, James Comey, and James Clapper might prove how much.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week authorized Chair Ron Johnson to issue subpoenas for more than 35 people connected to Crossfire Hurricane. Given the breadth of Spygate, it is unlikely Johnson’s committee will succeed in unpacking the totality of the misconduct. Three names on the list, however — Susan Rice, James Comey, and James Clapper — indicate Americans might soon learn more about any complicity by Barack Obama and Joe Biden in our country’s greatest political scandal.

Details released over the last month reveal President Obama and Vice President Biden knew more about the targeting of Trump transition team member Michael Flynn than previously realized. Several recently declassified documents, when read together, suggest Obama had a hand — and, at a minimum, Biden acquiesced in — the attempt to destroy Flynn and intrude upon the functioning of the new Trump administration.

Much of the declassified information concerns a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting. According to the FBI’s 302 interview report, on that date, “Yates, along with then-FBI Director James Comey, then-CIA Director John Brennan, and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were at the White House to brief members of the Obama Administration on the classified intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities in Recent U.S. Elections.” Rice, Obama’s then-national security adviser, and others were also present, including Biden, according to an email Rice later sent to herself.

According to Yates, “After the briefing, Obama dismissed the group but asked Yates and Comey to stay behind.” Then, “Obama started by saying he had ‘learned of the information about Flynn’ and his conversation with [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Kislyak about sanctions.” Yates’ 302 further stated, “Obama specified he did not want any additional information on the matter but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-protests-public-health-experts-ideology-distorts-risk-assessment/

M ere weeks ago, public-health experts worried about transmission of coronavirus sternly warned against large, crowded gatherings. That was before the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25.

From that moment on, many epidemiologists and public-health officials have justified people congregating to demonstrate against police brutality. On June 2, for example, Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and former health commissioner of New York City, tweeted, “People can protest peacefully AND work together to stop covid.” That same day, a senior epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins tweeted, “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

An open letter signed by 1,288 public-health experts, infectious-disease professionals, and community stakeholders judged marching to be “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people.” The signers, while counseling marchers to distance, disinfect, and wear a mask, made clear that similar risks should not be tolerated, “particularly protests against stay-home orders [that are] rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.”

Overnight, the risk calculus changed. Instead of expert advice on the danger of exposure to coronavirus when, say, riding a subway, sending your kid to camp, or dining out, now the social value of the undertaking became part of the public-health equation. The risk of thousands of marchers wedged together (many masked but many not) spreading the virus by singing and chanting was suddenly acceptable in the eyes of outspoken members of the public-health establishment.

Flashback to April, when public-health experts were quick to criticize Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia for easing lockdowns. Apparently, the two politicians’ values of salvaging the economy and relieving social isolation, both causes of significant emotional distress, failed to “greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” Compared with marching for social justice, they weren’t deemed as worthy.

https://spectator.us/imagine-police-force-godfrey-elfwick/

The one resounding call from Black Lives Matter protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s death has been ‘defund the police’. This is a rallying cry I am 100 percent on board with. In an unprecedented move, Minneapolis City Council has chosen to see sense and formally announced plans to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and committed to establishing a new community-led system. This is exciting news, and sets a precedent for this model to be repeated around the world. However, many people (racists) are criticizing this bold strategy of tearing down the fascist state, because they simply cannot imagine their lives without the comforting restrictions living under an oppressive authoritarian regime brings them.

I’m hearing inane questions such as ‘But what if my house is being broken into by an armed attacker?!’ Well that’s simple. In a community-led system of law-keeping, you would call the number of your allocated Peace Officer and explain clearly, and without prejudice towards the defendant, what the current situation is. Be sure to alert them to any possible reasons the robber (or ‘wealth distributor’) may possess to have been forced into a life of crime. Perhaps they come from a broken home? Maybe their minority status has caused them to feel disillusioned and understandably upset by the systemic disparity of wealth brought on by white patriarchy? Is it possible that their lived experience has led to a life of substance abuse which has spiraled out of control? Remember to not make racially-stereotypical assumptions about this person, and instead see if you can open a dialogue in order for them to be able to state their case without fear of being judged. Once you have passed on this information to the Peace Officer, they will immediately put out an alert on social media for other citizens in your area to send their thoughts and prayers to you at this difficult time, while also taking care to offer support to the wealth distributor who has been conditioned into breaking into your property by the multi-layered inequalities inherent within Western society. 

This can only lead to a gradual shift in attitudes, as people become more inclined to accept that being robbed, or physically attacked, or raped, is simply a consequence of years of colonization and white privilege.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/unable-to-run-its-own-agencies-washington-dictates-to-americas-police/

The federal government cannot even run its own limited law-enforcement missions properly. Where does it get off micro-managing policing on a nationwide scale?

Here’s a laugh: Washington intends to tell New York how to do policing.

The federal government has one premier law-enforcement agency, the FBI, and a sprawl of more specialized police forces — DEA, ATF, IRS’s criminal-investigation division, etc. These bureaucracies are dwarfed in size and scope by big-city municipal police departments, such as the NYPD. They are also, to be blunt about it, reeling at the moment because they don’t do their jobs very well: long on politicized arm-twisting, short on due process.

The FISA court recently found federal intelligence agencies guilty of an “institutional lack of candor” in dealing with the tribunal. That conclusion has only been bolstered by Justice Department reports outlining stunning abuses of power by the FBI, serial lying and leaking by top officials, fabrication of evidence, and investigations launched on a dearth of predication and furthered by entrapment tactics and perjury traps. We never did get to the bottom of the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which the ATF allowed illegal firearms transfers into Mexico — evidently hoping to fuel a political narrative against the Second Amendment but succeeding only in fueling violent Mexican gang crime that claimed the life of a border-patrol agent. A federal appeals court echoed a district judge in New Orleans, who was appalled when Obama Justice Department lawyers anonymously led a race-baiting press campaign to undermine the trial rights of indicted police officers and then misled and stonewalled investigators who tried to find out what happened. And speaking of misleading and stonewalling, they explain why we never got accountability for the bare-knuckles tactics the IRS used to harass conservative groups.

It is a measure of how frightfully irrational our times are that the “defund the police” campaign led by Democrats and Black Lives Matter activists is thriving. It has moved to the mainstream of progressive politics even as the need for effective policing becomes ever more palpable.

We are not talking just about the rampage that followed the horrific killing of George Floyd, which sent Minneapolis and many other big city hot spots spiraling into rioting and looting. The warning signs have been there for a few years, obscure at first but increasingly easy to see.

A new breed of progressive prosecutors, many of them backed by the George Soros network and other deep-pocketed leftwing organizations, has taken control in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban centers.

Philosophically, they see policing, prosecution and imprisonment as triggers of crime, rather than deterrents against it. They’ve targeted law-enforcement techniques rather than lawbreakers. They adamantly reject the intelligence-based policing and broken windows policies that have given us a generation of record low crime. They’ve eliminated cash bail, which means mandatory release for nonviolent crimes – with a very elastic definition of “nonviolent.”

Once again, we are seeing “That ’70s Show,” not the TV program but the phenomenon no one sensible ever wanted to see again: the one where the criminals are back out on the street making mayhem before the police can even finish the paperwork processing the last arrest. Pretty soon, the arrests slow to a trickle, even as the crime increases. Making arrests can be dangerous, and no one wants to take the risk over a pointless gesture.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/09/the-suicide-of-expertise/

After misleading Americans on a long list of consequential issues over the past few decades—from climate change to dietary guidelines and now the common cry of “systemic racism”—the body of expertise is twitching. In this case, I will even allow for coding its death as another coronavirus fatality.

In his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, author Tom Nichols argued that know-it-all Americans were tuning out the credentialed class at great risk to the country. “We rely on delegating decisions to other people who we assume are going to have some better knowledge of these issues than we are,” he said in an April 2017 speech. “Our republic functions on delegating decisions to others who rely on expertise to help make the best decisions we can make.”

Nichols, a rabid NeverTrumper, often ridicules Trump and his supporters as ignorant rubes who recklessly disregard the advice of Our Betters with Letters. Blaming experts for disastrous foreign wars or lousy trade pacts, Nichols insists, is just a craven political strategy. It is inconceivable to him that disgust with the expert class could be rooted in legitimate gripes or clear evidence of failure.

But like so many assumptions made by his NeverTrump cohorts, Nichols is wrong. Again. Expertise did not die at the hands of deplorable Trumpkins or even web-surfing suburban moms. Expertise wasn’t killed; it has slowly committed suicide.

And we are watching the final death throes of the credentialed class as the last gasps of their credibility can be heard across social media and cable news outlets. The tension between two forms of pseudoscience—social distancing and social justice—snapped, and the experts who vehemently demanded the former now take a knee to defend the latter.