RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/attacks-supreme-court-justices-are-real-assaults-bruce-thornton/

The recent leak of the draft of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe and Casey has ignited a national tantrum on the Left. Pro-choice organizations, Senators, and Congressmen are making veiled threats of violence against the five Justices voting for the pending decision; the usual suspects are promising “days of rage” redolent of the summer of 2020; and Justices have been doxed and their home addresses publicized––all are violations of federal law (18 U.S. Code § 1503), and all bespeak the Democrats’ modus operandi of resorting to force and intimidation to achieve their aims, rather than following the Constitutional lawmaking protocols and “democratic norms” they continually charge Republicans of subverting.

As usual with any assault on Constitutional guardrails, lies and the corruption of language are playing a big part in the (for now) rhetorical violence. Samuel Alito’s decision if it stands would not threaten any other Supreme Court decisions like those legalizing same-sex marriage or striking down segregation. It does not violate the Constitution, nor the principle of stare decisis, which is not absolute but contingent on the specific circumstances of particular cases. And, the big lie, it does not make abortion illegal or weaken democracy, but honors it by returning the issue of abortion to the Congress and the states, whose lawmakers are accountable to the voters.

Nonetheless, the intensity and irrationality of the tantrums and lies will likely move beyond words when the decision is formally announced, unless the earlier threats work and at least two justices submit to the intimidations of the mob. That outcome will be a sad day for our already weakened Democratic Republic, when one of its most critical protections against tyranny––the independence of the judiciary, upon which the integrity of democratic justice relies, and its crucial principle of equality before the law rests––is cancelled by intimidation and violence

This resort to force, as we saw on graphic display during the BLM and Antifa violence in the summer of 2020, is a repudiation of the founding principles of democracy going back 2500 years. The foundational principle of Athenian democracy, or any constitutional order run by citizens, is the substitution of language for violence. We see this epochal innovation memorialized in Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia, which starts with the dark, blood-soaked Furies who demand bloodshed to expiate bloodshed; and ends on the sunlit slopes of the Areopagus, where twelve citizens listen to arguments, deliberate, and vote to convict or exonerate.

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.

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.)

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.

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.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/08/the-exasperated-american/

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-taps-anti-israel-activist-cnn-spouse-as-white-house-press-sec/amp/

The White House announced on Thursday that Karine Jean-Pierre, a veteran anti-Israel activist who is married to CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, will replace outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki, raising potential ethical quandaries.

The announcement drew celebratory headlines in the mainstream press: Jean-Pierre is the first black woman and openly gay person to serve in the role.

But her relationship with the CNN reporter raises ethical questions about her new role. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether Jean-Pierre would recuse herself in dealing with CNN. Malveaux’s colleagues include Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, CNN justice correspondent Laura Jarrett, and Israel ambassador Tom Nides’s wife, Virginia Moseley, who serves as CNN’s senior vice president of news gathering.

“Suzanne Malveaux will continue in her role as CNN national correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House while Karine Jean-Pierre is serving as White House press secretary,” a CNN spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon.

Jean-Pierre’s anti-Israel past—which includes a stint as senior adviser and national spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, a far-left anti-Israel group that advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state—is raising red flags in the pro-Israel community. The selection of an Israel critic is also likely to further strain ties with the pro-Israel community and Israeli government, which already is strongly opposed to the Biden administration’s efforts to ink a new nuclear deal with Iran.

Jean-Pierre has been open about her animosity toward the Jewish state. She has accused Israel of committing “war crimes” and has backed efforts to boycott the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States’ most prominent pro-Israel lobbying shop, cheering Democrats in 2019 for boycotting the group’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., for “boldly [choosing] to prioritize diplomacy and human rights over the power of a lobbying organization.” AIPAC, she claimed, helped the Trump administration “sabotage” the Iran nuclear deal and also “supported the group that’s credited with inspiring President Trump to enact the Muslim Ban and has been known to spread anti-Muslim racism.” She accused the group without evidence of trafficking in “severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/reflections-peace-poetry-and-war-michael-finch/

The specter of nuclear war has risen again, it haunts our dreams for the first time in decades.  The “end of history” was supposed to have completed that chapter, but of course that evokes our own narrow vision of the world.  For those in the shadow of North Korea and for nations and peoples that fall in range of a seemingly inevitable nuclear Iran, those halcyon peaceful days of the end of history never existed.  Indeed, for all of us, “peace” never lasts, never endures, we all live in the shadows of chaos, war and share the nightmares of human nature and none of us can escape the horrors of our worst selves.

Trying to make logical sense of it is an impossible task, to get into God’s mind, to understand His will and his plans is a temptation that we all have, but it only leads further into a never-ending depressing fall into the abyss.  I will make sense as best I can by leaning on the writers and poets, the ideas and thoughts that speak as visions, and speak to hope.  Hope is indeed a dangerous thing, but hope and faith are all that ties us, tethers us, and anchors us from that endless abyss.

We yearn for peace, but peace is allusive.  Peace in our lives, peace in the world, it has never been, and never will be the norm.  We are blessed to live in a nation that has known peace as we have.  May we continue to be so blessed, though the horizon is darkening, and night is before us. 

The yearning is strong, but again, is so allusive.  William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem “Lake Isle of Innisfree” that “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”.  Indeed.  Wendall Berry sought answers in his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” which opens “When despair grows in me”, and “I come into the peace of wild things” closing with “I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”

And peace for the world, we also yearn for it, sometimes we become blinded by its allure.  Infamously British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 proclaimed we have “Peace for our Time”, yet just a year later the world would become fully engulfed in a war that would kill tens of millions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-loyalty-machine-democrats-dgb-disinformation-sec-climate-risk-fauci-covid-lockdowns-biden-inflation-

In her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” Elizabeth Warren describes advice she received from Lawrence Summers when he was Harvard’s president: “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

Want to see this in action? In his 2021 book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” about his time as an adviser to the Trump administration on Covid-19, the Hoover Institution’s Scott Atlas describes “a functioning troika of ‘medical experts’ composed of Drs. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield.” He “noticed that there was virtually no disagreement among them. It was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity—even though some of their statements were so patently simplistic or erroneous.” Loyalty! But was that for the best? After two years of Covid restrictions, obviously not.

Loyalty is overrated. Harry S. Truman, worried about communist infiltration, instituted a Loyalty Program in 1947 via executive order, expecting “complete and unswerving loyalty” from federal employees. Seventy years later, FBI Director James Comey insisted that President Trump, at a private dinner, asked him for his loyalty. Mr. Comey declined. Mr. Trump then asked for “honest loyalty,” which Mr. Comey agreed to, knowing it didn’t mean anything.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2019 ruling: “Presidents are not kings. . . . This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.” Amen.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/09/covid-proves-it-democrats-couldnt-care-less-about-minorities-or-the-poor/

New research reveals the enormous harm that pandemic school shutdowns had on students, and that minorities and the poor suffered the most, especially in places run by Democrats.

To understand the impact of school shutdowns on learning, Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research compiled testing data on 2.1 million students in 49 states to see how school closures and the use of remote “learning” affected academic achievement.

The findings are deeply troubling. Closing schools “had profound consequences for student achievement.” Worse, it widened economic and racial education gaps. The researchers found that “high-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and the consequences for student achievement were more negative when they did so.”

One of the study’s authors, Thomas Kane, told the New York Times that “this will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

The study also revealed a wide gulf between states based on how long they shuttered their schools – ranging from a handful of weeks to 20 weeks or more.

What the authors didn’t point out, but which is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn, is that states and cities run by Democrats kept their schools closed far longer than those run by Republicans.