RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/in-2021-they-tried-to-destroy-me

I haven’t forgotten. Or forgiven.

Last week, a Congressional committee released a massive report detailing how the Biden Administration stampeded the First Amendment in 2021 during its doomed quest to force mRNA vaccines on every American adult.

By July, with the mRNAs failing and Covid deaths rising, the White House privately and publicly attacked Facebook, trying to make the world’s biggest social media company censor jab critics. Facebook executives were furious – and worried about the Constitutional implications of the pressure they faced.

Yes, a private company proved far more concerned about the First Amendment than the government officials sworn to uphold it.

At the heart of the pressure campaign: Andrew M. Slavitt, a Democratic operative and healthcare investor. Slavitt pushed Facebook for censorship both during his official stint as senior advisor to the Biden Covid response team, which ended in June 2021, and afterwards – when the documents show he secretly represented the White House in conversations with Nick Clegg, a senior Facebook executive.

As you know, I have sued Slavitt, along with other government officials and two Pfizer board members, in federal court in New York for their conspiracy to force Twitter to ban me in 2021.

The new documents may play a crucial role in my case, Berenson v Biden, because they show Slavitt was acting on behalf of the federal government, not merely as a private citizen, in July, even as he continued his campaign against me.

The Biden Administration began pressing social media companies for censorship soon after it took office.

But the campaign accelerated in July, as the White House realized the mRNAs were failing and it would quickly need to push a third “booster” shot, as well as vaccine mandates, which it had previously ruled out.

On July 16, 2021, President Biden said Facebook and other social media companies were “killing people” by allowing vaccine criticism. In response, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then-second-highest-ranking executive, complained in a text chain with founder Mark Zuckerberg that the White House was blaming the company because of “a virus they can’t get control of.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/12/beyond-reason-how-shame-and-disgust-shape-law-and-society/

Some time ago, I participated in a conference about “policing in an age of terror.” One big topic was the place of informed hunches in the armory of the police.  Was it okay, or was it culpably racist, for the police to act on educated hunches when going about their jobs? Should they “profile” certain groups of people and, in some circumstances and in some neighborhoods, “stop and frisk” people they thought looked suspicious? Well, the heart, as Pascal famously assured us, has its reasons that reason does not know. About this, as about most things, Pascal was right. But what does it tell us about “rational hunches” or “policing in the age of terror?”

Before I endeavor to answer those impossible questions, I should acquaint you with my qualifications for intervening on this large topic. My short-form disclosure is: I have none. I am not a lawyer, judge, or police officer. I am not even an academic. In terms of qualifications, I am like the man on the Manhattan omnibus or subway—a chap I shall revert to later. That is, I bring no specialized or professional knowledge to the table, merely the advantages—if they are advantages—of commonplace sentiment.

Let me begin by acknowledging the air of paradox that surrounds the topic of the conference. “Rational Hunches.” Doesn’t that phrase express a paradox, not to say an oxymoron? The relevant sense of “hunch,” the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, refers to “a premonition or intuitive feeling.” Curiously, that sense of “hunch” is of relatively recent vintage. It isn’t listed in the main part of my edition of the OED; you have to look in the supplement to find it. But what business does a “premonition” or an “intuitive feeling” have consorting with the adjective “rational”: that which is based on reason, argument, and logic? Do we not usually, and rightly, oppose what is rational to what is intuitive, silently supplying the adverb “merely” before so cognitively challenged a mental operation? And do we not always, and rightly, do so when dealing with subjects as serious as law enforcement?

The honest answer is, not really. “Life,” as Samuel Butler ob­served, “is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

We do not like to admit that. In many ways, modern Western culture is also a Cartesian culture. We are rationalists and empiricists. Like the state of Missouri, we negotiate our way through the traffic of life with the challenge “Show me” announcing our progress.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/10/is-this-bidens-supermarket-scanner-moment/

“They have the money to spend.” — President Joe Biden

Those of us who’ve been around a while remember when the press made an epic deal out of President George H.W. Bush’s apparent amazement at an ordinary grocery store checkout scanner. It turns out the story was a complete media fabrication, but it fed the narrative that Bush was hopelessly out of touch, and it helped cost him his reelection.

This week, Joe Biden actually did do something that shows he is perhaps the most clueless president in American history.

In a softball interview this week, CNN’s Erin Burnett let Biden carry on — uninterrupted — with his usual litany of lies.

That he created 15 million jobs (there’ve been less than 6 million net new jobs under Biden – about equal to Trump’s over the same period).
That Trump told people to inject bleach (a claim repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers).
That a million people died from COVID on Trump’s watch (fewer than 470,000 had died when Biden took office; more than 720,000 have died since).
That “we have got 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what their average federal tax is? Eight-point-three percent” (a completely made-up number that we wrote about here).
That “when I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse of the economy” (nobody but Biden was saying that).

But then Burnett, to her credit, asked about inflation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/an-advertisement-for-anti-americanism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_

Most protesters, no matter how deep their disaffection from this country, at least try to hide their anti-Americanism.

That’s not true of the pro-Hamas agitators, who can’t be bothered. Such is their hatred of America — and its symbols, history, and heroes — that they casually engage in profoundly unpatriotic acts of desecration.

In New York City on Monday, on their way to disrupt the Met Gala, they vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park and a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman at Grand Army Plaza. In Washington, D.C., they’ve vandalized and/or turned into clothes horses for Palestinian flags and garb statues of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson.

En route to the Gala, the pro-Gaza mob stopped to climb and wave Palestinian flags on the memorial to the 107th Infantry and spray-paint graffiti — “Gaza,” “Free Palestine,” and “Let Gaza live.” If there were any doubt about the motive of this shabby act of vandalism, the agitators removed it by burning an American flag at the base of the memorial.

The soldiers of the 107th fought and sacrificed greatly in World War I. If the Central Park memorial, which depicts the soldiers charging into battle, isn’t famous or much noticed on any given day, it is still a significant act of memory that the protesters treated as an ashtray for their tawdry ideological obsessions.

Of course, it is doubtful that many of the protesters know much of anything about World War I, except perhaps that it took place sometime before World War II (assuming that they are aware of both conflicts).

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/the_deep_state_exposed_itself.html

As I’ve watched the political Uniparty and administrative Deep State conspire to destroy Donald Trump over the last eight years, a tinge of optimism has taken root inside me.  Not only have his tormentors been unsuccessful, but also a growing share of the population see the attacks against him as un-American, vindictive, and dangerous.  There is a heightened social awareness that D.C. is filled with corrupt people who operate the tentacles of government solely for their own benefit and enrichment.

No matter how omnipotent the Deep State appears, this couldn’t have been the outcome it expected.  With every iteration of the “Get Trump” operation, the vultures swirl overhead, eager to nip at his remains and scatter his defenders to the wind, yet the man and his supporters persevere.  Even worse for the D.C. Blob, every time Trump survives, a few more Americans rally to his banner.  Far from ensuring his demise, those who seek to weaken him have made him much stronger.

Think of all the malicious propaganda campaigns that would have surely sunk a less resilient individual.  After Trump’s 2016 victory, Hollywood celebrities desperately urged the Electoral College to disregard the results and install Hillary Clinton as president.  The pop culture industry cynically created the “Me Too” movement as a vehicle for driving him from office.  The Intelligence Community illegally spied on his campaign, blamed his victory on Russian social media trolls, and pushed the lie that he worked for Putin.  The Mueller Inquisition spent two years covering up the FBI’s anti-Trump activities, while doing everything it could to ensnare the president in perjury and obstruction traps.  Members of the military and National Security Council worked with Congress to turn a Biden-Ukraine bribery scandal into a Trump impeachment.  The Department of (in)Justice and too many unethical judges transformed the J6 election integrity protest into an opportunity to destroy lives and take political hostages.  Big-money Democrats have bankrolled countless civil suits against Trump in an effort to bankrupt his entire family.  Corrupt state and federal prosecutors seek to use Democrat juries to convict him on spurious charges and imprison him for life.  Corporate news hosts routinely defame Trump as racist.  Well known historians nonsensically claim that he is an aspiring dictator.  And despite four years of inflation, foreign invasion, and global chaos during Biden’s Oval Office occupation, hyperventilating foreign policy “experts” continue to drum up fear that a 2024 Trump victory will trigger economic collapse and WWIII.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-campus-intifadas-to-pronoun-mandates-who-is-our-common-enemy/

Some people need to be hit over the head to tie abstractions together under a Conceptual Common Denominator, and that is what we need as we look out at the various maladies afflicting American civilization, from the campus intifada protests calling for both the Islamification of the United States and the destruction of Israel, to the new pronoun mandate for workers, employers and even customers issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of the civil rights agency’s first move in a quarter-century to bring its workplace guidelines up to date with legal precedent and evolving social norms. This decision is the consequence of decades of queer scholarship and legal machinations to gain civil rights protection for behaviors once regarded as deviant but now part of a set of mainstream norms that protects trans people not only from being misgendered, but from having to use a bathroom that does not accord with their chosen gender.

The age of nihilism is upon us. We have witnessed the radical queering of America: the tran-sexualizing of students behind their parents’ backs; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that overtly discriminate against white men; Critical Race Theory that reinforces the idea—among others—that structural and systemic barriers still exist to keep blacks outside of public and private institutions; and the decimation of our universities that are now Marxist, anti-American indoctrination centers. This article will not list all the myriad social ills plaguing our republic today. They are well known to our readers.

The detritus, the putrefaction, the moral decay, all the forces of evil were possible because of one conceptual common denominator: liberalism. Everybody got let into the future and all standards were dropped to the lowest common denominator of the cheapest harlot on the block, who was told her inclusion was as valued as that of the righteous man. Every social ballast dragging down humanity was told, You too belong. Even pedophiles have been rebranded as Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) as part of a sinister path towards normalizing pedophilia.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/let-officers-control-unruly-protests

Since October 7, New York City has seen nearly 2,000 protests—about 12 protests per day, averaging 135 people each, though bridge-blocking actions can number up to 10,000 protesters. Indeed, unruly anti-Israel demonstrators in New York City have blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, Holland Tunnel, Columbus Circle, United Nations, John F. Kennedy International Airport, the New York Public Library, and, bizarrely, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The protesters are breaking the law by obstructing traffic, resisting arrest, and committing other acts of disorderly conduct. They are also harassing Jews and Jewish institutions, contributing to the tripling of anti-Semitic hate crimes between the first three months and last three months of 2023.

Where are New York’s police and prosecutors in all this? They are hamstrung by permissive state law, new city restrictions on police, and the decriminalization of “low-level” offenses. City leadership can restore order, but so far, it’s failing to do so.

Start with Mayor Eric Adams. In September, the mayor approved a settlement in a lawsuit brought against the city and police department by 2020’s “racial justice” demonstrators, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, and state attorney general Letitia James. Adams praised the decree as “a collaborative process” that struck a balance between public safety and protesters’ rights of free expression. It does no such thing. Instead, the settlement has crippled the NYPD’s ability to keep demonstrations under control, contributing to the anti-Semitic disorder breaking out in city streets.

The settlement reduces officer discretion by creating four “tiers” for escalating law enforcement. It institutes “red light” offenses that require senior brass to authorize any arrest, even if they’re not on the scene. It dictates the number of officers permitted at demonstrations, specifies the units they can belong to, and determines what equipment they can bring. And its “kettling” ban—to use a tendentious term for ordinary crowd-control tactics—ties officers’ hands in the event that safety demands large-scale arrests.