RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/05/16/police-investigating-mothers-day-assault-on-military-vet-n2589529

Louisville police are investigating an attack in a Kroger parking lot that left a disabled military veteran with a broken nose after an altercation on Mother’s Day.

Pamela Ahlstedt-Brown was beaten after she addressed the occupants of a car that were blocking her from leaving her parking spot, Wave 3 News reported.

I get out and I say, “Do you guys need any help?” and she said, “F*** you, you white b****.” I said, “Hold on, you don’t even know me.” I said, “That’s fine. If you don’t need anything, that’s fine. I’ll get back in the car.”

She said the passengers of the vehicle were four black women and that after their aggressive comments, they proceeded to throw a cup at her and beat her. 

She said she was in a fetal position during the attack, trying to protect her eyes.

Strangers were able to intervene and break up the incident, but not before Ahlstedt-Brown suffered a broken nose.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/royal_twit_prince_harry_declares_our_first_amendment_bonkers.html

Prince Harry seemed determined to outdo Meghan Markle on the obnoxious celebrity front. The oafish royal on the lam from his U.K. duties, who’s now set up shop here to live the billionaire lifestyle, is now, like a lot of them, telling us how to run our country. He’s calling our First Amendment ‘bonkers.’

Kid you not.

According to the London Spectator (hat tip: Daily Caller), citing a podcast interview that Prince Harry made with the Davos-like Aspen Institute:

I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers. I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time. But, you can find a loophole in anything. You can capitalise or exploit what’s not said rather than uphold what is said.

Translation: Harry doesn’t have a clue. He’s as baffled as Mad King George, that guy who got quite the write-up in our Declaration of Independence of 1776, about the idea of free speech. Like the Duke of Wellington, who had an issue with people moving about freely as ‘escaping all proper control,’ Harry’s gone back to the era of bad royals trying to tamp down the public. Yet he also has the hypocrisy to do it while he insists on living with us.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/17/neurotic-america-masks-today-masks-tomorrow-masks-forever/

A number of retail chains announced last week they are not requiring fully vaccinated customers to wears masks in their stores. Not everyone was happy to hear the liberating news, though. Our country, once a bulwark of the strong and daring, is becoming a land of the fainthearted.

Minutes after The Hill tweeted Friday that Trader Joe’s was no longer demanding that its customers self-suffocate, at least those who’ve been fully vaccinated, the scolds and skittish school marms took their shots before running to hide under their beds.

“Not good,” said one, without explaining why it’s not good.

Other responses included: “I’ve only been there once and it looks like it will be my only time for a while,” and “I will not be going to #TraderJoes 4 a long time.” Many concurred: They’ll also avoid Trader Joe’s. One commenter said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back again. All that was missing was Joe Biden calling Trader Joe’s executives Neanderthals and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claiming the stores are “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.”

Certainly everyone is free to express their opinions about masks, and everyone is also free to decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t like the Trader Joe’s policy. Yet the response concerns us. Will enough Nervous Nancies and Timorous Toms boycott Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco and others that have liberalized their mask policies to force the companies to backtrack on their decisions (which will help restore the humanity dignity that was ripped away by mask rules)? Will they actively picket in front of stores in an effort to bully executives into yielding to their neuroses, fixations, and superstitions? 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-freedom-survive-the-narratives-11621185599?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS:

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgia’s new voting law to be “Jim Crow on steroids.” It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.

There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.

Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.

Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/15/israeli-arab-refutes-aocs-claim-that-israel-is-an-apartheid-state-n1447260

On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other members of her “Squad” endorsed the claim that Israel is an “apartheid state” and therefore is not a democracy. An Arab-Israeli activist who served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) defended his homeland from her slanderous claim. Many Americans on the Left have taken the Palestinian side in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, due in part to this argument.

“Apartheid states aren’t democracies,” AOC tweeted on Saturday, with Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) echoing her words. AOC and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) shared videos of MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s monologue arguing that Israel is an apartheid state.

“Palestinians are at best, third class citizens in the nation of their birth. The idea that it is even remotely controversial to call what Israel has imposed on Palestinians as apartheid is laughable,” Velshi argued.

Yoseph Haddad, an Arab who actually lives in Israel, powerfully countered AOC’s claim.

“I’m Yoseph, an Israeli Arab. I checked the definition of apartheid and you seem to be confused by the propaganda of this political org,” Haddad tweeted. “Arabs like me have full equal rights and live, learn, work, and play together. Take it from me, I live it. Stop lying.”

Speaking on Israel’s I-24 News, Haddad explained that Israel is a multi-racial society

“Here you will see Israeli Jews and Arab Christians and Arab Muslims and Druze and all kinds of minorities. Here they shop together, work together, go to school together, make art together, save lives together, report the news together, serve in the army together, protest the government together, even work as lawyers and judges in the courts together,” he said.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/14/house-gop-members-want-answers-on-january-6-probe/

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Representatives Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked for information about the Justice Department’s abusive investigation into January 6.

“Those that damaged property and assaulted police officers on January 6th should rightfully face justice,” the pair wrote in a letter sent May 14. “However, the public outcry and hyper-politicization of the events on January 6th may incentivize prosecutors to use overly aggressive tactics, overcharge, and abuse the power of the federal government in order to satisfy favored political groups.”

Roy and Massie asked Garland to schedule a briefing with Congress before the end of the month to address several concerns, including how plea deals are arranged, the FBI’s use of force in raiding the homes of nonviolent protesteors, and the Justice Department’s request to hold defendants behind bars pending trial. “[C]ongressional oversight of these prosecutions is essential as a check and balance on that power.”

House Republicans finally are pushing back on the Democrats’ largely fabricated narrative about what happened on January 6. Several GOP congressmen confronted ex-Trump officials in a House hearing on Wednesday, demanding answers on the killing of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran shot by a still-unidentified Capitol Police officer, and all the “outright propaganda and lies,” as Representative. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said, peddled by Democrats and the news media.

Gosar also called for the release of the surveillance video captured by the Capitol Police’s security system on January 6. The USCP and Joe Biden’s Justice Department are fighting to keep those recordings under seal even from defense attorneys.

In a lengthy speech on the House floor Friday afternoon, Representative. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) expressed his outrage over the Capitol breach investigation; he cited numerous articles from American Greatness detailing how defendants are being treated and how political protest is being criminalized by Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/15/the-way-of-socialism/

Anyone who doubts that those in charge of the operation of Providence have a sly sense of humor needs only to ponder the sweet declarations emitted by our more pampered celebrities on the subject of socialism. I remember, for example, when the actor Jim Carrey told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.”

What a card! Were socialism to be instituted in the United States, one of the first things that would happen is that people like Jim Carrey—with an estimated net worth of $180 million—would be instantly pauperized. For what are the two fundamental pillars of socialism? The abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. And the cherry on top of this fudge sundae is that Jim Carrey actually starred in a movie called Dumb and Dumber, which is about “two unintelligent but well-meaning friends from Providence, Rhode Island.” Talk about art imitating life.

Let’s leave the latest incarnation of really-existing socialism—the country of Venezuela—to one side. That is a laboratory demonstration of what happens when you take a prosperous country and rigorously impose socialist policies on it. Jeremy Corbyn was partly right when he said the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez showed there was “another way” of doing politics and “it’s called socialism.”

Corbyn forgot to add: that way leads to universal immiseration and societal collapse, which is exactly what is happening in the once-rich South American country now. 

Is Joe Biden on the cusp of doing to us what Chavez did to Venezuela? To be frank, I do not think the American people will let him. But in the House of Fiscal Misery there are many mansions, and so far the actions of the Biden Administration have not been encouraging, as anyone who can pronounce the words “inflation,” “consumer confidence,” “energy prices,” or “taxes” knows full well. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/after-de-blasio-says-subways-safe-4-slashed-subway-daniel-greenfield/

You can set your clock by what New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio says as long as you want to be late everywhere and to everything.

“What’s happening right now is clearly at the instruction of the governor, MTA leadership is fearmongering,” de Blasio said in an interview Friday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’ve ridden the subways. So many folks in my life ride the subways all the time. They’re overwhelmingly safe,” the mayor said, adding that “there have been some incidents that truly are troubling.”

Here’s the latest “troubling incident”.

A group of men who are believed to have attacked at least four different people – slashing three of them – during a 12-minute violence spree on Friday morning

The first of Friday’s incidents was reported around 4:25 a.m., when a 44-year-old man riding a southbound No. 4 train was approached by two men, one of whom slashed him in the face, police said. The victim got off the subway at Manhattan’s Union Square Station.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-paranoid-style-in-progressive-politics

The other day I found myself staring at this headline in the New York Times: “GOP Focuses on Polarizing Cultural Issues in Drive to Regain Power.” For a moment, I thought the article would, in a commonsense way, explore how Republicans were confronting the polarizing cultural issues that had been created by liberals. That is to say, I thought the article would be about the hardball nature of American politics.

Instead, it presented Republican opposition to explosively controversial questions like packing the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and giving legal status to illegal immigrants as part empty cynicism, part mental imbalance. The reporter, Carl Hulse, portrayed the Republican resistance to such extreme Democratic initiatives as a determined effort to appease the “conservative base.” That’s a phrase that has become a Democratic mantra signifying chthonic forces of disorder, and it has the effect of halting in its tracks any political argument or debate.

Nowhere in Hulse’s report was there an acknowledgment that the Republican focus on these matters was a legitimate form of democratic politics—as robust, and constitutional, as the calculating Democratic manipulation of same. What’s more, Hulse noted that “Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats’ push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.” The article treats “systemic racism” as a settled historic fact, as though it were the institution of slavery in the antebellum South. But systemic racism—the assumption that white racism is fundamental to American identity—is not a settled historical fact, having been discredited by, among others, at least a score of distinguished liberal historians. And transgender rights are a complex matter, extending from protection of transgender people under the law to the question of transgender athletes—on which there is no consensus on the right—and the issue of sexual-reassignment surgery for children. But Republicans violently “hammer” at such settled questions “in a drive to regain power,” while Democrats gently “push to confront” and “safeguard” them in a spirit of truth and justice.