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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Another conservative Supreme Court justice under attack By Rajan Laad

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/another_conservative_supreme_court_justice_under_attack.html

Earlier this month, ProPublica attempted to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, implying in its reporting that he was compromised due to his friendship with real estate mogul and billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow based on the holidays the Thomas family spent with the Crow family.

It led many Democrats who themselves have engaged in ethically questionable behavior to besmirch Thomas.

The high priestess of liberal hypocrisy, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a.k.a. AOC, who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for possible violation of congressional rules for accepting impermissible gifts, is one of the loudest advocates of branding Thomas as corrupt and demanding his impeachment.

The mainstream news media, which is a P.R. wing of the Democrats, amplified the chaos.

The target now is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Just yesterday, Politico carried a hit piece with a provocative headline: “Law firm head bought Gorsuch-owned property.”

Heather Mac Donald On Race and Crime, a Counterfactual Narrative The notion that blacks are at elevated risk for “existing while black” is true—but not because whites are killing them.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-race-and-crime-a-counterfactual-narrative

The shooting of a teen-ager in Kansas City, Missouri, has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America. Meantime, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored.

On April 13, 2023, at around 10 P.M., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm door handle. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door. Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.

Every news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. Yarl was inevitably identified as a “Black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative. The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence—life in prison—is higher than that for attempted murder.)

President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. “Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine (“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “Brown and Black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address) that he doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. Biden invited Yarl to visit the White House when he had recovered.

‘It’s Fairy Dust’: The Proud Boys Case Goes to Jury The fate of five men who supported Trump and protested Joe Biden’s election on January 6 lies in the hands of a biased D.C. jury. Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/25/its-fairy-dust-the-proud-boys-case-goes-to-jury/

A marathon January 6 trial besieged by scandal, controversy, and acrimony is now in the hands of a Washington, D.C. jury. After nearly four months of back and forth, the government and defense attorneys made their final pitch during closing arguments this week in the multi-count case against five members of the Proud Boys.

The drama surrounding the trial, both inside and outside the courtroom, is worthy of a Netflix series: shocking revelations of numerous FBI informants, deleted government evidence, outbursts from the bench, colorful defense attorneys, last-minute accusations of an assault on police, a mysterious “attack plan” sourced to a former intelligence operative, and concerns over a jury stalker, to name a few.

At the center of the drama are innocent men held behind bars awaiting trial as the January 6 Select committee conducted televised hearings portraying the Proud Boys as one of the masterminds behind a “domestic terror attack” the Biden regime compares to 9/11.

Unfortunately, the public heard none of the proceedings firsthand as the D.C. courthouse refuses to allow call-in access for jury trials. (Props to Roger Parloff at Lawfare for his blow-by-blow coverage on Twitter.)

The Proud Boys trial is the most consequential January 6 trial to date for both the Justice Department and Donald Trump. The government devoted an untold amount of resources and manpower to the case. The former president loomed large as prosecutors frequently cited his September 2020 debate remark for Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” as a call to action. (More on Trump’s legal jeopardy related to the outcome of the trial in Friday’s column.)

Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs, and Dominic Pezzola have been incarcerated under pretrial detention orders since early 2021 on various counts, including conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding. By the time jury selection began in December, the defendants had been in jail for almost two years awaiting trial.  Rehl, Pezzola, and Biggs are military veterans with no criminal history. (Biggs is a Purple Heart recipient.) Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader, was arrested on similar charges in March 2022.

The War on Humanity Escalating . . . and cloaked, as always, in claims of progress. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-humanity/

The hallmark of modernity is metaphysical materialism: the notion, as atheist Daniel Dennett put it, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” The consequences of proclaiming that immaterial reality––mind, soul, God––doesn’t exist has been the rise of antihumanism, the stripping from people of their transcendent worth, and the reduction of them to a “sort of stuff” in the world, to be studied, understood, reshaped, and ultimately controlled like any other bit of matter.

Our world increasingly over the last two centuries has seen not just man’s eternal inhumanity to man, the result of our destructive, immutable passions and impulses that have made history, as Edward Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Now there’s antihumanism, a much more subtle danger, always cloaked in claims of progress and improvement in human affairs that are brought on by science, a pretension that has made it much more destructive.

Robert Zubrin writes in Merchants of Despair that “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism,” is Thomas Malthus and his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus claimed that any population always grows geometrically larger than its food supply, a hypothesis which ignored the creative ingenuity of people. Worse were the consequences of his theories when applied to the real world.

For example, falsely believing that Ireland was overpopulated, the British government allowed this food-exporting island to spiral downward into famine partly because, as Malthus himself said, many agreed that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Over a million Irish died of starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition.

Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect in India contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”

The same antihuman sentiments and amoral logic characterized the work of neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted hundreds of millions dead from mass starvation by the 1970s, and the disappearance of England by the year 2000. And like Malthus, Ehrlich proposed illiberal and inhumane interventions like involuntary sterilization, which China later imposed on millions of its people with its “one-child” policy. In 1977, Ehrlich co-authored a book, Chelsea Follet writes, that proposed “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child,” and discussed “adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods.”

Charges Loom for Hunter Biden as His Dad Launches Presidential Bid By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/25/charges-loom-for-hunter-biden-as-his-dad-launches-presidential-bid-n1690151

The big news of the day is that Joe Biden, in a pre-recorded video, announced his 2024 presidential campaign. Polls have repeatedly shown that Americans don’t think he’s done a good job and that he’s too old for the presidency, but that may not be the worst of his problems.

Lawyers for Joe’s embattled son, Hunter Biden, are expected to meet with Justice Department officials this week to discuss possible tax fraud charges and another charge stemming from a gun purchase, according to CNN. The meeting comes amid allegations by an IRS agent that Hunter Biden received preferential treatment during the agency’s investigation. Two senior law enforcement sources told NBC News last week that most of the work on Hunter Biden’s case was completed around a year ago and expressed frustration over the mishandling of the case.

The federal investigation of Hunter Biden began in 2018, and the decision of whether or not to press charges will be made by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and subsequently retained by the Biden administration.

“Oddly enough, Hunter’s criminal case has been revived from the dead, only days after a career IRS supervisor filed for official whistleblower protection, accusing the federal government of shielding Hunter from criminal charges,” Fox News’s Sean Hannity said. It is somewhat poetic that, after shielding Hunter Biden from criminal charges for roughly a year, it’s now very possible that Hunter Biden could be indicted the same week his dad announced his presidential campaign.

Hunter Biden notified Burisma colleague of planned Blinken meet: emails By Josh Christenson

https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/hunter-biden-told-burisma-colleague-of-blinken-meet-emails/

First son Hunter Biden kept his business partners apprised of at least two scheduled one-on-one meetings with Antony Blinken, emails reviewed by The Post show.

The decade-plus-long relationship between Blinken and Hunter made headlines last week after the House Judiciary Committee revealed that former CIA acting director Michael Morell testified in private that Blinken — then a Biden 2020 campaign adviser — “triggered” a letter from 51 ex-intelligence officials that sought to discredit The Post’s reporting on bombshell emails from the first son’s abandoned laptop.

The Post’s initial scoop detailed Hunter’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, a position he attained in April 2014 despite no previous industry experience.

On May 22, 2015, 13 months after joining the Burisma board, Hunter Biden emailed Blinken, then President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, with a request.

“Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things. Best, Hunter.”

“Absolutely,” Blinken emailed back. “I’m just about to land in Tokyo en route back DC from Burma. I’ll be in office from Tuesday on. Copying Linda in my office to find a good time. Look forward to seeing you. Tony.”

Hunter Biden forwarded Blinken’s reply without comment to Devon Archer, a fellow member of Burisma’s board.

“Roger,” Archer responded.

Confidence in Leadership by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19603/confidence-building-in-leadership

Military journals report that the United States is preparing to make the Pacific island of Guam a veritable “fortress.”

One suspects no one has used that phrase since the days just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when the United States finally woke up to the fact that the Land of the Rising Sun had every intention of owning the Pacific. History would go on to record that our decision to fortify Guam would come too late as our isolated defenders would eventually be forced to surrender to overwhelming enemy forces. Few would survive their imprisonment.

Today, military analysts say that 21st century Guam could be overwhelmed by Chinese drones, missiles, and carrier-borne fighter-bombers to ensure that our extensive military outpost could not interfere with any potential invasion of Taiwan. It is the reason the Pentagon is racing to place resources and weaponry on that island in hopes it will deter what some believe is the inevitable Chinese attack on Taiwan.

All of this begs a larger question.

Is America’s Commander in Chief capable of responding strategically to the threats facing our nation? And even a broader question. Does he have the confidence of the American public that he is right person for the job at a time when we are witnessing an inconceivable land war in Eastern Europe and a Chinese military that is deliberating seeking to isolate our allies while engaging in provocative military activities designed to test our resolve.

The Marines have a saying, “Know your enemy.”

So, it would be instructive to review what one historic Chinese philosopher long counseled.

How Strong Is the Power of American Capitalism? By Rainer Zitelmann

https://pjmedia.com/columns/rainerzitelmann/2023/04/24/how-strong-is-the-power-of-american-capitalism-n1690018

David Brooks wrote an article on “The Power of American Capitalism” in the New York Times on April 20, 2023. As someone who wrote a book called The Power of Capitalism a few years ago, I welcome the sentiment: capitalism is stronger than ever, despite all the doomsayers. Brooks cites a report published by The Economist on American economic performance over the last three decades. Using an avalanche of evidence and data, the main thrust of the article is that far from declining, American capitalism is dominant and accelerating. Brooks cites a host of facts, including:

Back in 1990, for example, America’s gross domestic product per capita was nearly neck and neck with that of Europe and Japan. But by 2022, the U.S. had raced ahead.

In 1990, the U.S. economy accounted for 40 percent of the nominal G.D.P. of the G7 nations. By 2022, the U.S. accounted for 58 percent.

In 1990, American income per person was 24 percent higher than the income per person in Western Europe. Today, it is about 30 percent higher…

In 1990, the U.S. economy accounted for about 25 percent of global G.D.P. In 2022 it still accounted for roughly 25 percent, The Economist found.

This is good news indeed. But what should be added is that much of America’s economic growth has only been possible because of the spread of capitalism around the world in the decades from 1990 to 2020. Developments in China, in particular, where unprecedented growth has been achieved since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in the early 1980s, have also boosted growth in the United States. Contrary to the widespread perception in the U.S. that unequal trade with China is to blame for many of America’s woes, capitalist globalization has also significantly benefited American companies operating around the world. When countries like China, Vietnam, and India grow, it does not hurt the U.S.  America benefits too.

Biden’s corruption is enough to disqualify him from office now By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/bidens-corruption-is-enough-to-disqualify-him-from-office-now/

A little advice to Republicans overseeing the Biden investigations: Don’t worry if he’s a criminal. It’s bad enough to be corrupt.

James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has been teasing details about his committee’s Biden investigation.

We’re led to believe that a dozen of more Biden family members — not just the president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter, and his smooth-operator brother Jim — will be implicated in the transfer of piles of foreign money into the family coffers.

Comer suggests that the only rational explanation for this is that foreign regimes, including such hostile ones as Communist China, were buying Biden’s political influence.

This would be shocking if proved.

“A Cockeyed Optimist” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

It is easy to be pessimistic:

Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.

Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom. 

Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.