RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/guilty-until-proven-innocent-11625697428?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

“If the FBI and U.S. Attorney have proof of wrongdoing, bring it on. But the burden for depriving an American of property is on the government to prove guilt, not on the targeted to prove innocence.”

When the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills in March, it did so after the business had been indicted for conspiring to launder money, sell drugs and other crimes. But the FBI also took control of $86 million in cash and valuables it found in the safe deposit boxes of people who haven’t been accused of a crime. Some of these folks have sued, and two weeks ago federal Judge R. Gary Klausner granted a temporary restraining order preventing the FBI from taking permanent legal title of the seized contents of the plaintiffs’ boxes.

The Institute for Justice is representing seven plaintiffs in this case. Their argument is that they have done nothing wrong and should not have to go through the cumbersome civil forfeiture process to prove that their cash, jewelry or precious metals are legitimately theirs.

Judge Klausner seems to think they may have a case, taking aim at the FBI’s forfeiture notice. “This notice, put bluntly, provides no factual basis for the seizure of Plaintiffs’ property whatsoever,” the judge wrote in granting the restraining order.

U.S. Private Vaults is a private safe-deposit company that asks fewer questions than banks, and its boxes could be used to stash ill-gotten cash, drugs or other loot. Even so, the Fifth Amendment guarantees the right to due process before property can be taken.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/07/07/biden_inc_hunter_joe_and_the_mexican_oligarchs_146043.html

The indictment of the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer has received a lot of press, and properly so. But while the media has been focused on the former president, they have ignored another corruption story involving the sitting president and his family. Like so much news that has been buried, the latest comes from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. You know, the one the Bidens and their allies in Congress and the media suggested was a “Russian plant” and disinformation campaign, before that cynical claim was demolished by the director of national intelligence.

The latest buried story involves some photographs, taken in Joe Biden’s office in 2014. They include the then-vice president, his son Hunter, and Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico (and once the richest in the world), plus some of Slim’s associates.

Why are the pictures newsworthy? Not because some U.S. officials met with some rich foreign businessmen. That happens all the time. Their real significance is that the vice president met with these guys and included his son at the same time Hunter was working on lucrative business deals with the same people. That looks like self-dealing by the Biden family, despite Joe’s repeated insistence that he knew nothing about his son’s business.

Hunter had other meetings with Carlos Slim and associates in Mexico. Those came after he flew there with his father on Air Force Two, just as he had flown to similar business meetings in China. When you arrive on Air Force Two, when your father is the second-highest official in the U.S. government, and when you bring your business associates to meet him, you are sending a clear signal to potential partners around the world: “I’m incredibly well connected and, if you do business with me, I can open the biggest and best doors in the U.S. government for you.”

Since Hunter has no other marketable skills, opening those doors is the only thing you are paying him for. In country after country, the oligarchs Hunter was wooing had the good fortune to meet with the vice president, meetings that Hunter apparently arranged. Some were held in the host countries, some on the White House grounds.

When you have connections like this in Chicago, you whisper, “I know a guy.” Hunter virtually shouts it. He knows a guy: the “Big Guy,” as one of his secret notes describes his father. That note laid out how the lucre from another deal would be divided, with the “Big Guy” as a silent partner. A partner in that deal, Tony Bobulinski, has publicly stated that all the partners knew the “Big Guy” (or BG) was Joe Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/what-is-trump-to-us/

Donald Trump became the political vehicle for the American people’s resentment of an overweening, corrupt ruling class. Trump’s invaluable contribution to the Republic was to lead Americans publicly to disrespect that class. 

Americans elected Trump to preserve freedoms and prosperity against the encroachments of that class. But instead, he became the catalyst by which that class cohered to transform the American Republic into an oligarchy. 

During Trump’s presidency, more wealth passed from ordinary Americans to oligarchs, and more freedoms were lost than anyone imagined possible. As we consider how to remedy these losses, Trump’s fateful combination of things said and unsaid, of things done and not done, must be part of our search for the persons and policies most likely to lead republican Americans out of our quandary.

Persona Politica

In 2015 and 2016, candidate Trump’s disrespectful, disdainful attitude toward the ruling class put him at the head of presidential preference polls ab initio, and kept him there. Throughout the campaign, he said little of substance—just enough to give the impression that he was on the side of conservatives on just about everything. His leitmotif was “I despise those whom you despise because they despise you. I’m on your side, America’s side.” 

Trump promised to “make America great again,” but did not explain what had made it great in the first place nor how to restore it. Never a religious person, and one who had once expressed support for abortion, Trump delivered more stirring thoughts on religious freedom and the right to life than any candidate ever, including Ronald Reagan.

Trump believed in the unity between himself and his followers, and that they would stay with him, even if he were to shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. Millions of them reciprocated. The political, and even the moral content of that unity mattered less. He did not try to support his many accusations with facts. Millions who disagreed with him or who disliked him personally voted to make Trump president, and even more voted to reelect him. 

But whatever Trump might have thought, his voters knew that hatred for the ruling class—not Trump himself—was why they supported him. It was about themselves, not Trump. The ruling class knew it, too. That is why, for most of the past six years, it brayed so much disdain from every available venue on him personally, trying to convince at least some of his followers that he is unworthy of decent people’s allegiance. 

We need not rehearse the size, provenance, ubiquity, and vehemence of the ruling class’ attacks on Trump. It is near impossible to recall any official, semi-official, corporate, educational, media, or professional association that did not take part in them, often repeating the very same words ad nauseam. Trump’s peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/new-anti-terrorism-strategy-narrowly-tailored-lloyd-billingsley/

“This National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lays out a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties – values that make us who we are as a nation,” explains an introduction attributed to Joe Biden in the document, released last month by the National Security Council. This strategy, readers learn “is narrowly tailored to focus specifically on addressing violence and the factors that lead to violence.” As it happens, this “narrowly tailored” approach is nothing new.

The strategy reflects the fundamental transformation by the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. He changed the focus from radical Islamic terrorism to “right-wing” domestic terrorism, and imposed that strategy in the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In April of 2009, DHS released Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment. These rightwing extremists, the document claims, are “mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.” The “possible passage of new restrictions on firearms” also disturbs them.

“We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity,” proclaimed DHS boss Janet Napolitano, “ but we do not – nor will we ever – monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.” According to critics, Napolitano’s DHS was targeting most conservatives and libertarians in the country.

Some six months later, on November 5, 2009, American-born Muslim Nidal Hasan, a self-described “soldier of Allah,” murdered 13 American soldiers and wounded more than 30 at Fort Hood, Texas. The composite character president called it “workplace violence,” not domestic terrorism or even gun violence. Hasan’s victims included blacks and Hispanics, but the administration did not call it a hate crime motivated by racism.

The FBI was monitoring Hasan’s communications with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki but dropped the case and did nothing to stop the mass murder. Major Hasan didn’t fit the “right-wing” profile, which kept appearing in DHS documents such as “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1979-2008.” This 2012 study classified as “extreme right-wing terrorists” persons judged to be “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty.”

Consider also Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right, from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. This 2013 study warns about the “anti-federalist movement,” whose members “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights.” They also support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self-government, so these potential terrorists sound a lot like millions of mainstream Americans. The National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism takes this genre to new depths.