RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/evil-florida-john-stossel/

Omicron spreads. The media say, “Governments must act!”

Many have, bringing back mask mandates and closing schools.

Do these rules work?

No.

My new video shows why Florida’s approach is better.

Gov. Ron DeSantis ended pandemic restrictions last spring and refuses to impose new ones. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” he said. Lockdown states let “hysteria drive them to do really damaging things.”

The media hate him for saying things like that.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/27/scared-stupid-and-easily-manipulated-what-covid-has-revealed-about-the-nations-young/

The saying goes that crises reveal your true nature. If that’s the case, we are in big trouble, because what COVID has revealed about young people in America is not good.

A new Morning Consult poll out this week finds that young people are the most worried about getting COVID of any age group — even though their risk from the disease is negligible.

At the other end of the spectrum, the elderly are much less worried, even though they are at the highest risk of death.

The poll found that 23% of those between ages 18-34 are “very worried about getting sick from COVID-19 within the next year.” That’s the highest of any of the age groups broken out by the survey. Another 35% are “somewhat” worried. Just 38% say they aren’t worried.

Among those 65 and older, in contrast, only 17% are “very worried,” while 39% aren’t worried.

Why in the world are young people so terrified of COVID?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/26/cdc-covid-messaging-problems-fauci-rochelle-walensky/6563468001/?gnt-cfr=1

CDC chief Rochelle Walensky seeks professional coaching, but public needs more than sleek image. Not hyping threats or demonizing skeptics is a start

Americans don’t trust their public health experts, a serious problem in the best of times but downright dangerous amid a pandemic. Just 44% of Americans trust in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, while only 40% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci (the nation’s point man on all things COVID) according to an NBC News survey conducted this month. Trust in politicians is even lower.

It’s perfectly understandable why Americans feel this way. At all levels, our public health agencies have been using contradicting claims and supposition masquerading as fact. And it’s not hard to diagnose the root of the problem. To quote the Captain’s speech in “Cool Hand Luke,” “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Trust and public health

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-college-couldnt-get-away-bidens-high-court-criteria-supreme-court-racial-preferences-justice-breyer-11643236096?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement has whistled the start of that Washington blood sport known as a Supreme Court confirmation. While the filibuster-free process guarantees President Joe Biden that he has the votes to pick anyone acceptable to all Senate Democrats, this fight is different from any in history in one respect. As a candidate, Mr. Biden pledged to select the next justice first and foremost on race and sex.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we, in fact, get every representation,” he said in a South Carolina debate. This reportedly helped win him the key endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip.

With the court set to rule on racial preferences in college admissions, it raises the question of whether it is appropriate for a politician to use a criterion that the court itself has found unconstitutional for public educational institutions and unlawful for businesses.

It also means Mr. Biden’s short list will be much shorter than usual. The three leading candidates are Justice Leondra Krueger of the California Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs. These are all worthy candidates who could have been considered for any vacancy without declaring that they were qualified by virtue of filling a quota—an unfortunate implication for the ultimate nominee.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-problem-with-holocaust-trivialization

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could … cross the Alps into Switzerland,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Washington rally this week to protest vaccine mandates. “You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy’s suggestion that people suffer more from vaccine mandates than the victims of Adolf Hitler’s reign is particularly disturbing. Holocaust “trivialization,” comparing other events to the Holocaust and thereby minimizing its significance, is not just morally reprehensible — it also complicates U.S. efforts to confront such global challenges as making peace, promoting human rights, and eradicating a pandemic.

Holocaust trivialization is inherently polarizing. Once one side of an issue accuses its opponents of a Holocaust-like action, the two sides retreat to their corners, far more inclined to fight than seek common ground. When protesters in London, Paris, and elsewhere last May compared Israel to Nazi Germany and suggested that it was conducting a Holocaust against the Palestinians, that further complicated efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Over-the-top disparagement of the Jewish state also diverts global attention from the truly despicable human rights abuses by, for instance, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which holds hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps; Xi Jinping’s China, which holds more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in prisons and “reeducation” camps; Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which stamps out any serious political or grassroots challenge to his rule; and Ali Khamenei’s Iran, which imprisons dissidents and treats women and minorities as second-class citizens.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/25/donald-trump-and-the-future-of-maga/

In 2016, Donald Trump pulled off an extraordinary political feat only he could have achieved. As the army of highly compensated professional political consultants in Washington, D.C., watched aghast, Trump single-handedly wrested the Republican nomination from the grip of a GOP establishment that had long enjoyed complete control of national and state party hierarchies, fundraising structures, and think tanks that determine policy priorities. As Trump’s rogue campaign trounced establishment candidates in state after state in the GOP primaries—despite the unified opposition of Conservatism, Inc.—he not only defeated that establishment’s lockstep institutional opposition, he defeated their agenda in a way that permanently shifted the debate on the Right and throughout the country.

On his signature issues of immigration, trade, and foreign policy, Trump blew up the two-party orthodoxy that had reigned in Washington for decades. Despite a lack of any discernible popular support, the GOP and Democratic establishments had settled into a broad, corporate-backed consensus in favor of virtually unrestricted immigration, “trade agreements” that subsidized the mass movement of U.S. manufacturing overseas and the mass importation of cheap foreign goods (often the products of slave labor), and interventionist adventurism abroad. Any dissent from this consensus was marginalized swiftly and aggressively by the establishment enforcers of both major parties, with heretics labeled as extremists, lunatics, or both.

Exposing the Rot

Within a matter of months, Donald Trump demonstrated that this seemingly unassailable establishment consensus was, in reality, a paper tiger. Outside of the Washington Beltway, the agenda of open borders, “free trade” with an increasingly dominant and aggressive Communist China, and endless wars abroad, enjoys virtually no popular support. While the D.C.-centric constituencies promoting these policies—deep state bureaucrats, special interest lobbyists, and defense contractors—profited enormously from this general agreement among the ruling class that brooked no dissent, the interests of average Americans oppressed and abused by the elite agenda went almost entirely unrepresented in Washington. Trump’s meteoric rise demonstrated that all that was lacking was a champion independent enough of the major party structures to buck the false consensus.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/florida-teen-converts-islam-murders-13-year-old-robert-spencer/

When Corey Johnson was 17, he murdered a 13-year-old boy, Jovanni Sierra Brand, and stabbed two other people because they “idolized celebrities and disrespected his Muslim faith.” Johnson is now 21. On Thursday, he got a life sentence for the murder, but no one seems to be pondering the larger implications of the case.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Palm Beach County Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo sentenced Johnson to life in prison and said on Thursday she did not believe rehabilitation was likely for Johnson after he remained emotionless during the heartfelt testimony of Jovanni’s mother.”

When he was in court Thursday, Johnson did make an attempt to show remorse: “I wish I could take it back, I wish I could do something to make this right. I’d like to apologize not because it will change anything, but because I’m really truly sorry.” Johnson also, according to the Daily Mail, said that he “regretted following the Islamic extremist group ISIS, and that he hoped to help people to compensate for the crimes he had committed.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18175/dershowitz-upholding-constitution

[W]hen law professors such as Cornell University’s Michael Dorf — who is an acolyte, water-carrier and co-author of America’s most prominent constitutional hypocrite, Professor Laurence Tribe — set out to defame… anyone, for a principled representation of unpopular defendants, it becomes clear, and alarming, how much trouble the Constitution is in.

Dorf apparently does not remember the principle often attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

He also deliberately omits the fact that my “oeuvre” includes representing half of my clients on a pro bono basis and that many of my cases have focused on the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the death penalty.

[T]he reader is given no idea even of how many people were included in this admittedly “unscientific poll,” or how they were selected.

Sometimes it takes an absurd event to illustrate the high cost of upholding crucial principles, such as the right to counsel. For nearly 60 years, I have tried to emulate John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, Edward Bennett Williams and others in the pantheon of my legal heroes, by representing, as they did, the most hated and vilified defendants. In making that career choice, I knew that I would be criticized by those who do not understand the constitutional right to counsel and the need for every defendant to receive zealous representation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-judge-strikes-down-governor-hochuls-mask-mandate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

A New York State Supreme Court judge on Monday ruled that Governor Kathy Hochul’s mask mandate for schools and other public locations is unconstitutional.

Judge Thomas Rademaker found that the governor and the state health commissioner did not have the authority to enact a mask mandate without the state legislature, given that the governor no longer has emergency powers.

The mask mandate has been in place since mid-December, when the state saw a surge in the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

“There can be no question that every person in this State wishes, wants and prays that this era of COVID ends soon and they will surely do their part to see that is accomplished,” Rademaker wrote in his decision. “However, enacting any laws to this end is entrusted solely to the State Legislature. While the intentions of Commissioner Bassett and Governor Hochul appear to be well aimed squarely at doing what they believe is right to protect the citizens of New York State, they must take their case to the State Legislature.”

The ruling comes from a state Supreme Court based in Nassau County, which is a trial court. The New York Court of Appeals is akin to a more traditional “Supreme Court” in terms of authority, in that it is the state’s highest court.