RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-public-health-mafia/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Led by boss Anthony Fauci, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power.

 T he public-health community is behaving like the Mafia. They come offering protection. They control the politicians. And they threaten businesses that don’t accede to their demands.

Led by boss Anthony Fauci, and comprising many federal, state, and local officials, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power, and they have no plans to give any of it up.

The protection racket is based on the conceit that if we simply do as they command, we will vanquish Covid. It started with the now-infamous “15 days to slow the spread” and the effort to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. This quickly turned into six weeks and then months of rolling lockdowns and, in some areas, more than a year of closed schools.

Vaccines, they assured us, were to be the end point of the pandemic. But a year after they became available, and eight months after they have been widely available, the medical Cosa Nostra still insist that people who are fully vaccinated — and boosted — need to wear masks in public (even though they initially convinced people that masks were ineffective).

When the policies that they propose do not produce the promised results, and as one variant after another surfaces, the response is to argue that we have shown insufficient respect to them and that we need to make amends by being more loyal to their guidance.

It is not only the public to whom the public-health mafia offers protection but also politicians. Any politician who defies the orders of the public-health community can expect blistering media coverage whenever there is a surge in cases, as has been the case with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Politicians who follow public-health guidance might not be protecting their constituents from the virus, but they are protecting themselves from getting blamed, as with New York governor Kathy Hochul, by operating with the imprimatur of the family. Recall how it was common to blame Donald Trump for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths on his watch. But President Biden, who has deferred to health officials, is spared any blame, despite the fact that more people have died of Covid under Biden.

“His two big promises were to get Covid behind us and to get rid of Donald Trump,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said on Sunday. “Covid’s not behind us, and Donald Trump’s still lurking. It’s not his fault, but is that why we’re in this no-man’s land here for him?”

And herein lies the essence of the control over political leaders. The current Covid surge, while openly reported on, isn’t being framed as Biden’s fault, because he has agreed to defer to the experts. He is granted protection, and any blame for the persistence of Covid is targeted at those who are challenging his mandates.

To be clear, it is perfectly appropriate for public-health officials to present the best and most up-to-date evidence to decision-makers and advise them on what they believe to be the best course of action to fight the spread of infectious diseases. But it is the role of elected leaders to weigh any such advice against other priorities.

https://www.city-journal.org/florida-v-critical-race-theory

Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”

DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.

The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”

As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-adams-mayor-new-york-impossible-to-save-crime-policing-bail-reform-rikers-stop-frisk-11639772226?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Optimism is running high in the wake of Eric Adams’s election as mayor. As a former cop who grew up in the city, Mr. Adams appears to understand the corrosive effects of disorder. Keechant Sewell, his pick for commissioner of the New York City Police Department, has 25 years of policing experience. Together they will try to bring sanity back to a city that has lost its way.

But there are serious reasons for concern about the capacity of Mr. Adams—or any mayor, for that matter—to confront effectively the wave of violent crime overtaking the city. Over the past decade, changes in the law, shifts in prosecutorial focus, and the imposition of federal oversight have limited crime-fighting options. In important ways, the city’s toolbox of resources to restore order has been rendered unusable.

However one feels about the use—or supposed overuse—of “stop, question and frisk” during the Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg years, there is no dispute that the policing tactic was instrumental in driving down the rate of violent crime in New York. Any serious effort to remove guns from the street—either through seizure or by persuading criminals to leave them at home—will depend to a large extent on empowering cops to stop and frisk people they reasonably suspect of carrying weapons.

But that avenue is now largely closed to the NYPD. Mayor Bill de Blasio dropped the city’s appeal of a federal ruling that its use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional. The NYPD’s patrol policies and practices remain under the supervision of a federal monitor, whose office minutely oversees the department’s compliance with its guidelines. Any effort to expand stop-and-frisk will run up against this oversight.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/leftist-journalists-float-idea-criticizing-joe-robert-spencer/

The Leftist political and media elites are desperately afraid of Donald Trump, even more than they were when they relentlessly defamed him and tried to run him out of office with a hoax collusion conspiracy and a tempest in a teapot over a routine phone call. A Trump return to the White House on January 20, 2025, would represent a massive repudiation of those who have arrogated to themselves the authority to tell us what to think, and those self-appointed intellectual and moral superiors are doing everything they can think of to try to preserve their crumbling hegemony. The New Republic, one of the flagship publications of the Left before it became completely authoritarian and irrational, on Saturday joined Dana Milbank of the Washington Post in offering one of the most absurd and dangerous recommendations for how to stop Trump and his supporters: stop criticizing Joe Biden.

Yes, that’s right: The New Republic is mulling over destroying our free society in order to save it. concerns mount over the future of free and fair elections, a debate has broken out about whether the media must protect Biden to save the republic. Jason Linkins, a deputy editor at The New Republic, begins his piece by saying: “This week, President Joe Biden hopped onto Zoom in an effort to shepherd the world along the path to stronger global democracy, during a two-day summit with other world leaders. He’ll be making his case, however, amid growing concerns about democracy here at home.”

The concerns about democracy that Linkins is talking about aren’t the lingering questions about election fraud in 2020. On the contrary, Linkins is talking about the supposed destruction of democracy that the Left would have us believe would ensue were Trump to attempt to return to the White House in 2024. “Whether we like it or not,” says Linkins, “there is reason to be gravely concerned. But against this backdrop, an interesting debate has broken out about the press’s role in protecting our too-fragile institutions and raveled civic fabric from a Trumpian assault—and whether the media, in an effort to support democracy, must unflinchingly support Biden, as well.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/16/democrats-promised-an-insurrection-but-all-they-got-was-a-lousy-obstruction-case/

History, it appears, is repeating itself—at least when it comes to the latest crusade to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him.

For nearly three years, the American people were warned that Donald Trump had been in cahoots with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election. Trump-Russia election collusion, the original “stop the steal” campaign—that is, until questioning the outcome of American elections was designated a criminal conspiracy after November 2020—dominated the attention of the ruling class and the entirety of the national news media.

Every instrument of power—the FBI, a secret surveillance court, congressional committees, a special counsel—was leveraged to uncover the “truth” about the Trump campaign’s alleged dirty dealings with Mother Russia.

Hyperbolic accusations about the president, his family, and close associates were similar to accusations now levied against those associated with the so-called “insurrection” said to have been incited by Trump: Russia collusion, like the four-hour disturbance at the Capitol on January 6, rendered Trump a traitor, a threat to democracy, a wannabe dictator, a psychotic cult leader, and a menace to global security—to name just a handful of the more outlandish claims.

Democrats sang Christmas carols and lit candles in honor of Special Counsel Robert Mueller; it only was a matter of time before Mueller’s posse of partisan attorneys dragged Trump out of the Oval Office in handcuffs and arrested him for conspiring with Vladimir Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton, they believed.

Then, disaster. Forced by William Barr, Trump’s new attorney general, to conclude his two-year fishing expedition, Mueller finally issued his long-awaited report in April 2019: “[The] investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller never was going to find proof of Trump-Russia election collusion and everyone in Washington knew it. The final confession came as a shock only to the millions of brain-dead Americans deceived by professional liars such as Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). To soften the blow, Mueller’s team instead pivoted to suggestions that Trump likely obstructed justice on numerous occasions, all in situations related to the president’s attempts to stop the destructive witch hunt against both him and his advisors, including former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/17/americas-real-authoritarians/

A particular line from our Thursday editorial reminded us of something we’ve been seeing for some time now: claims by the media that Republicans in general and Donald Trump in specific are authoritarians. It’s a truly malignant form of psychological projection.

The comment referenced in our observation that dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism that struck us is from Northeastern University journalism professor and public radio panelist Dan Kennedy. He said, with zero supporting evidence, that the Republican Party “has embraced authoritarianism and voter suppression.”

The only “proof” he offers is a report from a European think tank that says in 2020 “the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.”

Well, let’s see what happened in the U.S. in 2020. A pandemic arrived and policymakers all across the country quickly began violating rights by shutting down businesses; outlawing the people’s right to freely assemble (unless they were rioting for the right reasons, that is reasons approved by Democrats and the media); trapping people in their homes; arresting those who dared to move about without government permission; requiring masks in public and private settings; forcing kids to muzzle themselves for entire school days; and in some cases demanding proof of immunization to carry on as normal.

In the beginning officials from both parties were guilty of the excesses. But in 2021, it’s the Republican red states that have returned lost liberties while Democrat blue states, and Democrats in Washington, continue to violate freedom with the cheerleading of the press.

But the report doesn’t say the panicked and irrational pandemic response was the fuel driving the U.S. toward authoritarianism. It blames Trump’s questioning of “the legitimacy of the 2020 election results,” as well as “baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation,” which “undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/16/looks-like-dissent-is-no-longer-the-highest-form-of-patriotism/

Remember how, when Donald Trump was president, writing bogus attack pieces and talking endlessly about how he stole the 2016 election were all good for the country. Because, you know, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Now, reporting undisputed facts that happen to be unflattering to the current president poses a grave threat to the survival of the nation. That’s what journalists are saying.

As President Joe Biden’s approval numbers continue to collapse, and polls – including the latest I&I/TIPP poll – find that Trump is more popular than Biden these days, some of the “truth to power” crowd are using their platforms to attack their fellow scribes for being “too negative” on Biden.

The argument is that hurting Biden increases the chances that Trump, if he runs, could reclaim the White House in 2024, and that will be the end of democracy as we know it.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, for example, makes the (ludicrous and thoroughly debunked) claim that the media coverage of Biden has been more negative than it was in Trump’s last year in office, and then delivers this message:

“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

Yikes! Milbank works for the paper, by the way, that adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in 2017 as a thumb in the eye of Trump.

Milbank’s anti-journalist diatribe didn’t raise a peep of protest from his colleagues. It did, however, warm hearts in the Biden administration. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, promoted the column on Twitter, with the caption “submitted for your consideration.” Other White House officials also touted the piece.

Dan Kennedy makes the same argument on WGBH.org: “Large swaths of the media simply cannot or will not move beyond both-sides journalism, equating the frustratingly hapless Democrats with a Republican Party that has embraced authoritarianism and voter suppression.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/democrats-whistle-past-crime-wave/

This past weekend, twenty CEOs from big box retailers sent a letter to Congress, asking for help in combatting the rampant theft that is plaguing their stores.

While it’s refreshing to finally see these companies speaking up, it’s hard to ignore the irony of their circumstances. After all, a little over a year ago many of these retailers were sending out emails to their customers that echoed the far-left rallying cries of progressives. No one asked for Best Buy or Ulta to weigh in on social issues, but they were more than happy to virtue-signal anyway.

Plenty of the stores that signed on to this letter have openly supported the Black Lives Matter movement. To understand what that means, you have to understand the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. One of the founders of BLM described the group’s creators as “trained Marxists.” In June 2020, Alicia Garza, one of the three founders, excused the violence and destruction caused by the riots. 

“We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property,” Garza said. “That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen. The stores will reopen.” 

The socially aware CEOs didn’t let the red flags stop them. Instead, they appeased the alligator with empty woke statements. Now that the “undocumented shopping” is affecting these companies’ bottom lines, they are fed up. So they are asking the same people who fanned the flames to help them put out the fire.

Unfortunately for these companies, many Democratic politicians aren’t concerned about crime. Instead, prominent voices on the left are still promoting asinine ideas like defunding the police and bail reform.

In San Francisco, thanks to Proposition 47, thefts under $950 are labeled misdemeanors rather than felonies. In November, after a Louis Vuitton in Union Square was ransacked, Mayor London Breed offered her solution: “We’re going to be making some changes to Union Square and how cars are able to access. There will be limited access in terms of when you come to this area.” Why focus on prosecuting criminals when you can focus on parking? 

While some leaders offer pathetic band-aid solutions, others prefer to deny, deny, deny.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18033/president-privilege

A former spouse, a lawyer’s former client, and a penitent’s former priest can claim privilege — and so could a former member of Congress and a former judge. The relevant issue is whether the communication was privileged at the time it was made. If so, it should be an enduring privilege that encourages confidential communications during their incumbency.

According to The New York Times, this is what [the House’s lawyer] said: “The Constitution does draw a clear line between a president and an ex-president. An ex-president is somebody who rejoins the great unwashed” — by which he apparently means you and me, who never had any executive privilege.

The issue is an open one that will likely be decided by the Supreme Court. I doubt that justices who are now retired or intend someday to retire — and join the “unwashed” — would be thrilled if Congress were to subpoena their former law clerks to disclose their confidential discussions about decisions they wrote while they were still among the washed.

They [the January 6th Committee] should seek to have the courts rule first on the constitutional issue, and if Meadows then refuses to comply with a judicial order, they can seek criminal penalties. This chronology is especially required because Meadows has said that he would comply with court orders.

Seeking a court order first is also required by the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.

Finally, criminal indictments should never be used to determine what the law is. It should only be used against individuals who know that they are violating existing law that is already clear.

The Constitution provides no clear answer to whether a former president can claim executive privilege over communications that occurred while he was president. Both policy and analogy to other privileges would suggest an affirmative answer. A former spouse, a lawyer’s former client, and a penitent’s former priest can claim privilege — and so could a former member of Congress and a former judge. The relevant issue is whether the communication was privileged at the time it was made. If so, it should be an enduring privilege that encourages confidential communications during their incumbency.