RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/08/who-shot-ashli-babbitt-and-why-is-this-a-state-secret/

More than six months after the events at the U.S. Capitol that led to the shooting death of protester Ashli Babbitt, the officer who killed her remains a secret as carefully guarded as any in Washington, D.C. Why?

Real Clear Investigations reporter Paul Sperry – who has been trying for months to learn the name of the U.S. Capitol Police officer who pulled the trigger – reported that a name surfaced, inadvertently, at a February House hearing.

Sperry uncovered a transcript and reviewed the C-SPAN video from the hearing. During that inquiry, the House sergeant at arms appears to name the shooter – at least he mentions the officer’s last name in the context of that shooting. Sperry deduced, based on other available information, that he was referring to USCP Lt. Michael L. Byrd.

Sperry said the department hasn’t denied that Byrd was the cop who killed Babbitt, although it did so when another officer’s name started getting bandied about.

Weirdly, Byrd’s name is deleted from the C-SPAN and CNN transcripts of that hearing, but was contained in Congressional Quarterly transcripts, and can be heard on the C-SPAN video.

Why does this matter? The family understandably wants to know, and the public deserves the details about the shooting. Babbitt was not armed at the time, nor was she threatening anyone with physical harm. (She was trying to climb through a broken window.) Despite all the claims of an “armed incursion” into the Capitol building by Trump supporters, there was only one gun fired on that date – the one that killed Babbitt. There’s also the question of whether the officer involved has any history of misconduct.

The identity of Babbitt’s killer matters for reasons even beyond a family’s grief.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-keystone-xl-goes-to-court-11625784485?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The climate lobby cheered in January when President Biden revoked the State Department’s 2017 presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Now the bill is coming due, and U.S. taxpayers may have to pay.

Keystone owner TC Energy last week filed a Notice of Intent to take legal action against the U.S. government for withdrawing the permit. In a press release the company called the decision a “breach” of North American free-trade obligations. In June TC Energy officially canceled the Keystone XL and took a $1.81 billion writedown. It wants $15 billion in damages as part of a Nafta legacy claim under the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The U.S. has never lost before a Nafta arbitration panel. But TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) has a good case. To prevail, TC Energy will have to show that it had good reason in March 2020 to believe that its $9 billion investment was protected by the U.S. permit when it announced that it would “proceed with construction.” In other words, that it had a logical expectation it would be allowed to complete the pipeline and operate it. After years of environmental and other reviews, that was a reasonable conclusion.

Mr. Biden’s reversal on his first day in office was also irregular. Normally a company would have a chance to make its case, and the Administration would engage in a review. But Mr. Biden wanted theater for the environmental lobby, which trumped respect for an investor’s right to be treated fairly.

TC Energy isn’t challenging the Administration’s climate views, and its suit isn’t about reviving a project that promised to carry 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude a day to the Gulf Coast. The same oil will now be carried on trains, trucks and ships, albeit with greater risks of a spill and greater use of carbon energy. The company merely wants compensation for lost investment that is tantamount to expropriation under international law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-j-trump-why-im-suing-big-tech-11625761897?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

One of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of Big Tech corporations that have teamed up with government to censor the free speech of the American people. This is not only wrong—it is unconstitutional. To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing Big Tech to stop it.

Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media—banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.

No longer are Big Tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence. They are manipulating and controlling the political debate itself. Consider content that was censored in the past year. Big Tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true. In the middle of a pandemic, Big Tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of Covid-19. In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post—America’s oldest newspaper—for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden’s family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.

Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you—and believe me, they are.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2021/07/a-threat-assessment-for-american-jewry-part-one/

Which of the following samples of anti-Semitism—all having occurred in the last few months—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?

1) Hamas-style gangs pursuing and attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles.

2) Campus intimidation of the kind that makes the chancellor and provost of Rutgers University retract the statement they had previously issued against acts of anti-Semitism.

3) Elected members of the U.S. Congress who abet the war against Israel in this country.

4) Open letters by dozens of rabbinical students “in tears” over Israel’s forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes, and by scholars of Jewish studies and Israel studies who “share the pain of Gazans.”

The good news is that Jews are no longer alone in identifying the danger. Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, is one of many political commentators who now warn that anti-Semitism has reached, as she put it to the Wall Street Journal in May of this year, “pandemic proportions.” Speaking as someone who has herself experienced discrimination, she writes that anti-Semitism is based on the same belief as racism and other forms of prejudice, namely that “the other” is inferior and not entitled to the same rights as alleged superiors. She empathizes with the pain of Jews “in the same way that Jews sympathized with the racist oppression” suffered by black Americans.

Her acknowledgment of the danger of anti-Semitism is welcome and indispensable. At the same time, she mischaracterizes the problem. The legacy of slavery presents a very different challenge to Americans than the one presented by the organization of politics against the Jews, and those differences call for opposite responses. The idea driving the abovementioned attacks is not the Nazi claim that Jews are biologically inferior but the claim of Israel’s adversaries that Jews occupy other people’s land. In fact, Brazile’s anxiety was probably quickened by some of her fellow black Americans who include Jews in their attack on white supremacy and the Jewish state. Today’s attacks accuse Jews of their unfair superiority.

These distinctions in no way subordinate one set of injuries to another, but each requires its own diagnosis. Assessing the dangers that anti-Semitism poses to the Jews and America may help to clarify what it is and isn’t. I discuss them in ascending order of threat.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-im-not-writing-black?token=

A small part of me has always sensed that black when referring to race might be capitalized. The racial concept of black is so far removed from the core meaning of the color that it qualifies as very much a proper noun, a concept in and of itself, of a kind that suggests being couched as a label.

And if we’re in for a renovation of the term we use for referring to black people – and given how such things go it was about time: Negro yielded to black in the late 1960s; African-American settled in 25 years later; since the mid-2010s I’ve been wondering what would be next – Black is a damned sight better to me than African-American ever was.

* * *

I never liked it, and have only ever used it when grace required it. Black has always been good enough for me. For one, since the 1990s so many actual Africans have emigrated to the U.S. that the term African-American is increasingly confusing. Is a descendant of slaves in America “African-American” in the same way as the child of parents who grew up in Ghana and speak Twi at home? And let’s not even get into that white Africans in South Africa sincerely feel themselves, when relocated here, to be “African-Americans,” as do people from Africa of South Asian descent.

And overall, the African connection feels too distant to me to justify an ethnic designation. Opinions will differ on this, but to me, black Americans are not remotely “African” in the sense that, say, the Sopranos were Italian-American. Without the languages, with only extreme refractions of the music (as jazz and rock) or food, with different tastes and even values, I find the “African” designation forced – especially considering that “Africa” is no one thing (note how vacuous and depersonalizing it sounds to call white people “European”).

When “African-American” settled in, a critical mass of black people felt differently. The idea was that calling attention to our “roots” in Africa lent a certain sense of legitimacy, indicating that slavery was not the root, the essence, of what black people are. But this always struck me as an oversimplification of black history, and perhaps even a symptom of internalized dismissal. My “roots” are with the black people of my ancestry who forged lives right here in America, racism and the rest be damned. We might even respect what our ancestors thought. Black people even a generation past slavery who had known slaves born in Africa did not tend to think of themselves as “African.” I’m pretty sure my great grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, of whom one photo survives, did not. My great aunt T.I., trotting in the 1980s up the steep staircase at the North Philadelphia train station in her nineties, was not “African” in any sense: she was an American black woman.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/scapegoats-boogeymen-and-hobgoblins/

The world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America, and its sudden scapegoating of “white supremacist” hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve. 

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4 holiday weekend. About 150 of them were killed. The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city, African-American males. The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars. 

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders, from Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to Cori Bush (D-Mo.), blasted America’s foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans. 

During 120 days of rioting, arson, and looting during the summer of 2020, the country suffered about $2 billion in property damage, roughly 25 deaths, and some 14,000 arrests. 

Rioters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct. They set afire a federal courthouse in Portland. And they tried to incinerate the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church next to the White House. Downtown areas of Portland and Seattle were taken over by rioters, who occupied entire city blocks with impunity. 

Most of those arrested during the violent summer were either released or eventually had their charges dropped or vastly reduced. Although many of the Antifa and BLM rioters shouted revolutionary slogans, called for violence against the police, and carefully organized their rioting on social media, neither the media nor the government ever declared the rioters to be conspiracists or insurrectionists. 

In contrast, when roughly 500 renegade Trump supporters, in buffoonish fashion, broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the media and government immediately claimed it was a carefully planned “armed insurrection.” But no one was arrested for possessing or using a gun. 

Headlines blared of five killed. But four died of natural causes and three of those deaths were among Trump supporters. The only violent death was also of a Trump supporter and military veteran, lethally shot by a Capitol police officer while entering through a window. Her shooter remains unidentified. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/07/yet-another-one-of-my-uchicago-peers-was-brutally-murdered-by-a-stray-bullet-in-lori-lightfoots-crime-infested-city/

One of my University of Chicago peers was viciously murdered on Thursday by a stray bullet on a Chicago Green Line CTA elevated train. Like countless other UChicago students, Max Lewis was traveling home after his summer internship downtown, when a bullet came through the train window and struck him in the neck. Lewis passed away after being taken off life support on Sunday. He was 20 years old.

As a rising junior at the University of Chicago, Lewis was excelling. Reading about Lewis’s life, he sounds like the type of person we all hope to be—full of joy, surrounded by friends, and excited for his promising future. He was living in Chicago for the summer to complete a prestigious investment banking internship.

Lewis didn’t have to work in person, but he was such a friendly, dedicated individual that he chose to make the trek downtown. His young life was senselessly cut short when his train ride home was interrupted by yet another Chicago shooting. 

According to the police, Lewis was not the intended target of the attack. The case is still being investigated, and no arrests have been made. 

“Max was a talented student and beloved campus leader and friend who will be greatly missed,” UChicago stated in a university-wide email. “He was pursuing a double major in economics and computer science, treasurer of the Promontory Investment Research RSO, president of the fraternity AEPi, and actively involved in the student community on campus.” 

When reflecting on the loss of his friend and fraternity brother, Zachary Cogan rightly slammed Chicago’s inexcusable violence. “This happens all the time in Chicago,” he emphasized to the Chicago Sun-Times. “It needs to end.” 

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/07/04/new-hunter-biden-disclosures-feature-100000-donation-of-former-fbi-director-freeh-to-the-biden-grandchildren/

We recently discussed the latest disclosures from the laptop of Hunter Biden showing new business dealings leveraging access to his father — and further contradicting President Joe Biden’s repeated denials of any knowledge or involvement with his son’s deals.  Now there is a new disclosure of $100,000 given to the Biden grandchildren by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was seeking business deals with the Bidens.  As usual, there remains a virtual blackout on the Biden laptop or the mounting evidence of Hunter Biden’s influence peddling. Beyond a couple outlets like the New York Post, voters have to rely on the foreign press for coverage of the disclosures.

Freeh reportedly made the gift in April 2016 to the trust for the children of Hunter’s late brother, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015. The donation would well be a humanitarian gesture. However, it was the contemporaneous pitches for business deals with Hunter that has attracted the attention of some. In July 2016, he contacted Hunter and said that he “spoke to Dad a few weeks ago.” He tells Hunter “I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun and rewarding.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/08/dems-deny-their-agenda-three-times-to-avoid-public-crucifixion/

Three of the big issues of the day have the liberal left scrambling to pretend that it’s not a group of outside-the-mainstream radicals: defunding police, critical race theory, and voter ID laws. There should be repercussions for such cravenness.

After spending the better part of the year talking up a “defund the police” agenda, Democrats are now trying to claim that it’s Republicans who want to strip the police of their resources.

Defund the Police: For more than a year, leading Democrats – up to and including President Joe Biden – have talked up the idea of cutting police budgets because local law enforcement is plagued by racism.

During his campaign, Biden was asked, “Do you believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement?”

“Absolutely,” Biden responded.

In another interview, Biden was asked, “Can we agree that we can redirect some of the funding” for the cops.

Biden said, “Yes, absolutely.”

His running mate and now Vice President Kamala Harris said that governments must “reexamine” where their funding is going.

Democrats didn’t just talk about defunding the police. Deep blue cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Austin, Portland, and others acted on it, slashing police budgets. The predictable result was an explosion in violent crime. Over the July 4 weekend alone, more than 180 people were shot to death. Not only that, but ambushes of police grew more than 90% this year.

So what’s the Democrats’ response? To claim that it’s Republicans who are defunding the police.