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Ruth King

Who’s Paying Protesters to Harass Justices and Churches? It’s not an “insurrection” when leftists do it. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/whos-paying-protesters-harass-justices-and-daniel-greenfield/

Supreme Court justices have faced harassment and intimidation after a pro-abortion group calling itself Ruth Sent Us posted a map to their homes.

Justice Alito and his family, who wrote the draft opinion on abortion that had been leaked by leftists, have had to go into hiding at an undisclosed location.

Had conservative protests outside the homes of Sotomayor and Kagan led one of them to go into hiding, the FBI would already be on the case and the media would be calling it an insurrection and a threat to democracy, but it’s not political terrorism when leftists do it.

So you can be confident that none of the leftists threatening Supreme Court justices will themselves face justice. And if a single one of them is arrested, they will immediately have the best lawyers and a media press campaign claiming that free speech is being silenced.

Just to add bigoted intimidation of houses of worship, Ruth Sent Us also called for protests at Catholic churches. “Stand at or in a local Catholic Church,” it urged on its Twitter account.

While over the past two years, Big Tech companies have suspended or deplatformed conservative groups over the encouragement of political protests, including against lockdowns, Twitter has no problem with leftists encouraging the harassment of houses of worship.

“Do you dare to chant in your local churches?”

Abortion activists dressed like characters from the faltering Hulu TV show The Handmaid’s Tale disrupted prayer services while chanting their support for the murder of babies.

Golden Showers in the Media By Arjun Singh

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/golden-showers-in-the-media/

Did you read the title? Did it strike you as oblique and lurid, reminiscent of the Steele dossier’s salacious allegations? “Good,” Joseph Pulitzer would say. The 19th-century businessman and Democratic Party mover-and-shaker was a pioneer of such news copy. His marquee newspaper, The New York World, was sensational, scandalous, salubrious, and graphically outrageous – filled with colorful exaggerations designed to stimulate an opera of emotion: “yellow journalism.” There’s an oft-repeated line in the media that “sex sells.” Pulitzer and his opposite number, William Randolph Hearst, invented the idea long ago. In doing so, their pages reached circulation exceeding a million people, in the 1890s at that. Yellow journalism begat a gilded lifestyle for Pulitzer, who became fabulously rich.

Now, 111 years since his death, Pulitzer’s legacy of yellow journalism lives on in the ‘Pulitzer Prizes,’ whose 2022 honorees were announced on Monday. With award-winning irony, the endowment of Pulitzer’s wealth – built atop decades of gutter-press reporting – is now used to honor what many call the most prestigious award in journalism, for reportage supposedly of the highest quality. If Pulitzer were alive today, his work would never win the prize now in his name. Nobody would ever dream of it. It’d be like giving the National Enquirer – a celebrity gossip tabloid that funneled Donald Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels – the Nobel Prize in Literature. As one British journalist wrote of Pulitzer, he “strove for primacy of the sewer.”

DOJ’s Silence on the Left’s Lawless Intimidation of Supreme Court Justices Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dojs-silence-on-the-lefts-lawless-intimidation-of-supreme-court-justices/

“Biden’s thug government continues.”

Fox News has a report on the Biden Justice Department’s refusal to take enforcement action against radical leftists who have been conducting demonstrations at the homes of Supreme Court justices, blatantly seeking to intimidate and influence the Court while it has the Dobbs abortion case under consideration.

As Rich noted last week (citing Allahpundit), a federal penal statute, Section 1507, unambiguously criminalizes this behavior. I’ve heard some suggestion in the commentary in recent days that Section 1507 may violate free-speech principles. It doesn’t.

The First Amendment has always permitted reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. The degree of permissible restrictiveness is heightened as the government’s interest becomes stronger.

The Constitution insulates the judiciary from politics, so it is obvious that the government has a high interest in protecting the integrity of the judicial process, on which the rule of law depends, by safeguarding judges, jurors, and litigation participants from intimidation and corrupt influence (e.g., pressure to decide a case based on fear rather than on faithful application of the law).

Moreover, Section 1507 does not criminalize all expression; only expression undertaken “with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.” The government must prove this intent requirement beyond a reasonable doubt. The First Amendment is not a defense against menacing. Furthermore, free expression forbids only the criminalization of protected speech, not proof of speech as evidence of a standard crime. (The First Amendment, for example, does not bar a prosecutor from proving that the mafia boss said “Whack him” to the button man shortly before the murder.)

The Global Warming Scare Is Most Certainly Overheated

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/10/the-global-warming-scare-is-most-certainly-overheated/

Does anyone wonder where all the global warming destruction is? After all, the media are unrelenting in telling us how much climate change caused by man is affecting us. Yet no existential threat has emerged. There’s something off with the story.

The climate alarmists have based their predictions of doom on computer models that have been projecting global temperature increases, the likes of which, they tell us, are unsustainable. We must cut our carbon dioxide emissions, even if (actually, especially if) it hurts developed world economies.

This is the narrative we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. And it’s wrong.

Those models that have been used to fuel the fright are, without a doubt, unreliable. According to a recent story published in Nature magazine written by a group of climate modelers, “a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’ and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence.”

The authors, though, are careful to preserve the narrative, warning that “​​whereas unduly hot outcomes might be unlikely, this does not mean that global warming is not a serious threat.” They can’t help themselves.

Anti-CRT Conservative PACs Dominate Texas School Board Elections By Luca Cacciatore

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/critical-race-theory-school-board-elections-2022-texas/2022/05/09/id/1069152/

Candidates backed by conservative political action committees (PACs) swept Texas school board elections held on Saturday, as last year’s nationwide pushback against critical race theory materializes into on-the-ground victories.

Among the big winners was the 1776 Project PAC, a group that defines itself as forwarding those who “want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history.”

All 15 candidates endorsed by the PAC won their races across six school districts representing suburban Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, the group announced through Twitter.

“The election victories are evidence parents are still motivated to transform public education,” 1776 Project founder Ryan Girdusky told Newsmax on Monday. “For decades, conservatives sat out of these important elections – and we’re happy that the 1776 Project PAC could play a small part in these victories.”

Biden’s Disinformation Board is a Gift to Republicans | Charles Lipson

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-disinformation-board-gift-republicans-opinion-1704256

If you worked really hard, you might be able to come up with an idea as unappealing as a government disinformation board. Voters already distrust the government and are especially concerned about its excessive intrusion and unchecked regulatory power.

If you worked even harder, you might find as bad a person to lead it as Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled “disinformation expert” whose real specialty seems to be spreading disinformation to support her left-wing views.

If you tried hard to justify this mess, you might come up with a defender as ineffective as Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The secretary, already in deep trouble because of the porous southern border, faced a hostile Senate hearing and admitted he knew nothing about Ms. Jankowicz’s dismal history of ideological fulminations and partisan statements. He refused to say whose bright idea it was to hire her—only that he was clueless about her background. Still, Mayorkas refused to apologize, refused to replace her and refused to back down from creating this ill-conceived (and ill-defined) board.

If you did all these things, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has, you would be committing political malpractice. You would be mocking the Constitution’s fundamental protection of free speech, encoded in the First Amendment. Although a few ideologues might applaud you, you would hear only groans from moderate Democrats running for reelection. This ill-conceived board would lash them, at their peril, to a high-profile effort to monitor private speech, conducted by a very unpopular administration. That’s dangerous constitutionally and incompetent politically.

Why ‘Harvard Crimson’ BDS support demands our attention Why do so many Jewish 18-year-olds begin their university studies with the pro-Israel sentiments they learned at home, then emerge four years later more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause? By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-706074

The news that The Harvard Crimson newspaper issued an editorial in support of the BDS campaign to boycott Israel has surprised many in part because a Crimson editor had been active on social media stating how proud she is as a Jew to have had a part in the publishing of the editorial. We hear a lot about Jewish college students who have become pro-Palestinian. We know about polls showing that younger American Jews are much less connected to Israel than their parents.

How can this trend be explained? Why do so many Jewish 18-year-olds begin their university studies with the pro-Israel sentiments they learned at home, then emerge four years later more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel?

At least part of the answer to this question can be found in a recent essay by a retiring professor of Israeli and Middle Eastern history at another of the eight Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

More than 30 years, Ian Lustick taught about Israel to many members of the large Jewish student body at Penn. The total number of Jewish students who took his courses was at least many hundreds, perhaps thousands. He lectured to them every day, assigned their readings and answered their questions. He organized discussion groups, symposia and summer trips to Israel. When it came to Israel and the Arabs, Ian Lustick was their authority figure.

Reflecting on his recent retirement in the latest issue of the Penn Jewish Studies newsletter, Ian Lustick explained what he set out to do in his academic career and how he did it.

Will NATO Fight? by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18514/will-nato-fight

If NATO blood would in fact be spilt should Russia invade Poland or the Baltic states, why have we utterly rejected the prospect of spilling it to help protect Ukraine from Putin’s mass killings, torture, rape and destruction? Ukraine is not a NATO member and NATO states have no treaty obligation to come to its defence as they do to each other. But that is surely just a technicality, a few lines on a page. There is no practical or moral difference between protecting a friend who is a member of the alliance and one who is not.

[I]f nuclear terror applies to Ukraine, why doesn’t it apply to any NATO country that becomes the target of Russian military aggression? Why would NATO leaders fear Putin’s nukes any less if he takes a bite out of Poland or the Baltic states? The reality is, if it is true that NATO could not risk intervention over Ukraine for fear of Russian nuclear retaliation, it could not risk intervention over, say, Latvia for the same reason.

On top of that, every country in the West has capitulated to a concerted and systematic assault on its history, its virtue and its self-worth. Past glories are denigrated because they are not in line with 21st century wokeism… Governments, including defence and foreign ministries, the very people that must lead any fight against Russian attack, have succumbed to this sickness to the extent that even they abrogate their own past and repudiate their own present.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of a superstate, the European Union and its cheerleaders have been doing their level best to openly undermine and cancel national or patriotic spirit in member countries…

Can we expect Europeans to fight and die for countries whose histories and modern sense of worth have been roundly denounced and condemned by their own leaders?

No such feeling exists for the EU even as it seeks to replace national loyalty. Allegiance to Brussels is transactional and in only one direction. People ask not what they can do for the EU but what the EU can do for them. Of course many of our young people would fight for their country — with as much courage and commitment as their ancestors ever did — and we witness this whenever we send them into battle. But when the time comes to expand our forces, how many more will answer the call after being educated to despise their own country and the very notion of fighting for it?

If somehow the political and popular will to defend NATO member states did materialise, what would European countries fight with? Constantly expanding social welfare programmes have driven the military out of the marketplace across the continent.

While he remains in the Kremlin, Putin’s objective is the neutralisation of NATO. He knows that the alliance’s failure to fight for its own under his provocation would spell its final humiliation and signal the end of the US-led world order. For the liberty, prosperity and security of future generations, this cannot be allowed to happen.

This is not a rehearsal; it is a foretaste of the far greater threat that will be coming from President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party.

Great Britain is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public enemy number one. In March the Kremlin branded UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson the most active anti-Russian leader. A few days ago on television, Putin’s propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov fancifully suggested Russia should drown Britain in a radioactive tsunami created by Poseidon nuclear torpedos that would leave survivors in “a radioactive desert, unfit for anything for a very long time”.

The Doctrine of American Unexceptionalism The Biden administration believes that soft power is smart and hard power is dumb. Our allies are paying the price. Michael Doran

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-doctrine-of-american-unexceptionalism?token=

Russian leader Vladimir Putin was supposed to have used his Victory Day speech yesterday to reveal his intentions regarding the Ukraine war. Russia watchers expected him to define his aims, signaling a prolonged conflict or, possibly, a path to peace. As it turned out, Putin did neither. His war against Ukraine drags on.

But although this week failed to clarify the future of the war in Europe, there is still a small chance that it will offer us some clarity on another front: Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Iran nuclear talks coordinator, is visiting Tehran today, May 10, seeking to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Iran and the United States. His mission might teach us whether Tehran has decided to cut a deal with President Biden. Chances are, however, that we will end the week as much in the dark about Tehran’s intentions as we are about Putin’s.

To help us understand why, I turn to Michael Doran, the author of today’s essay. Doran sees a connection between the way the Biden administration has approached both the Ukraine war and the conflict with Iran. Namely: in both cases the White House has profoundly weakened America’s diplomatic hand by shying away from traditional deterrence.

Doran has never gone along with the crowd. He first came on my radar in 2005, after what we would now call “woke” professors mobilized against his bid for tenure at Princeton. I liked him immediately.

He has a knack for writing topical articles that age well. His 2002 Foreign Affairs article on Osama bin Laden, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” remains one of the best things written on al-Qaeda and radical Islam. When his 2015 piece, “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” first came out, Doran’s view about Obama’s eagerness to please Iran was controversial. It’s now common wisdom. And last year, when Biden took office, he co-authored a piece in Tablet Magazine, “The Realignment,” which predicted that President Biden would zealously follow Obama’s Middle East playbook.

Today’s essay tries to make sense of this administration’s baffling foreign policy strategy, which seems to offer succor toward our enemies, like Iran and China, while isolating allies in the Gulf and Israel. As Doran explains, this is not borne out of incompetence, but out of a deeply held ideology about the trajectory of America and the West. — BW

A MIDGE DECTER SAMPLER

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-midge-decter-sampler?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun%3A%20Taliban%20

Following is a sampler of writing by Midge Decter, who died Monday at the age of 94:

— from “Belittling Sholom Aleichem’s Jews,” Commentary, 1954:

“The truth is that ghetto Jewry was not pleased with itself at all. If it could be humorous, that was because it was sitting on a keg of spiritual dynamite and had no other way to protect itself against the big explosion. American Jews can afford to be pleased by the ghetto. Time and distance and indifference have settled most of its conflicts for us. And even we can only enjoy the ghetto by retroactively making of it something it was not quite: a new Jewish folk tradition.”

— from “A Commentary Report: Women at Work,” Commentary, 1961:

“The question of why it is that the American women can find it preferable to do any amount of routine drudgery on some assembly line or behind some sales counter rather than involve herself in all the physical details of caring for her husband and children has become a matter of grave concern to observers of American society — and even to herself. For her new pattern of living is undoubtedly plunging this country into a domestic crisis of major proportions, from which it will emerge with a good number of traditional family arrangements no longer intact.”

— from “The Strangely Polite ‘Dr. Strangelove,’” Commentary, 1964:

“‘Dr. Strangelove’ makes no overt political gestures in the end, but it does make a few covert ones. Indeed, for a work that so obviously regards itself, and that has been so readily taken, as a radical disruption of the going complacencies, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ is strangely polite in its choice of enemies: Jack D. Ripper is not only crazy, he is right-wing crazy; Buck Turgidson is not only sappy, he is sappy on the side of established military power; and the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, is a Nazi. No liberals are ridiculed in this ‘anarchic’ movie, unless one considers President Muffley a liberal, and even then he comes off relatively well. Nor was Kubrick quite daring enough to have risked portraying his nuclear strategist as a Jew — not a Nazi, but a refugee, in fact, from Hitler, as so many real-life nuclear strategists are.”