RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/kamala_harris_the_missing_czar.html

After Kamala got surprised (it seemed) by Joe’s announcement that she was taking over the “crisis” at the southern border, she has made herself almost invisible in the administration — at least in relation to anything that has to do with the mess farther south.

Various pundits have waxed political and psychological in trying to figure out why Kamala has not yet made a trip to the border with Mexico and has said precious little about the emergency she is purportedly overseeing other than indicating that she’s studying the root causes…which, of course, take a very long time to resolve.

Generally, the interpretations go along the line that the border crisis is a lose-lose proposition for anyone in Washington, D.C., who will surely get tainted by an out-of-control mess that nobody can unravel satisfactorily, at least not without returning to Trump-type solutions, which would be far worse for a left-wing Democrat than actually resolving the havoc.

But we have thought of yet another reason that has to be on Kamala’s mind as she makes herself almost invisible.  Our studied interpretation is nothing more than an educated guess, but it has its roots in real history.  And it has much to do with Kamala rejecting the title of czar as she goes missing on the border.

Now, we have noticed that Kamala doesn’t seem to have a broad sense of history, other than a few quotes from famous women in the past and her own declaration that, along with Biden, “we have a chance to change the course of history.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2021/04/21/blm-protesters-harass-nyc-dinners-after-chauvins-guilty-verdicts-n2588317

BLM protesters harassed diners in New York City during a march that started after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on Tuesday of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. 

The march began in Brooklyn with protesters chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Coming upon diners eating outside, some in the BLM crowd began shouting at the patrons. They also targeted the white business owners who make ethnic food.

“We don’t want you here! We don’t want your f**king money!” they chanted.

https://www.city-journal.org/chauvin-verdict-and-americas-troubled-rule-of-law

America’s cities did not burn last night. But the terrified preparations in Minneapolis and elsewhere in anticipation of the George Floyd verdict—the razor wire and barricades around government buildings, the activation of the National Guard, the declaration in Minnesota of a “peacetime emergency,” the fortified police presence, the curfews, the cancellation of school, the boarded up businesses—raise serious questions about the rule of law in the United States. Had the jury failed to convict Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, the ensuing riots would likely have made the conflagrations of 2020 look like a Girl Scout campfire.

This likely outcome was evident long before Congresswoman Maxine Waters encouraged such violence over the weekend. Last year’s precedent, the ensuing 12 months of wildly inaccurate rhetoric about white supremacy, and the recent looting in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over a fatal police shooting made such rioting a virtual certainty. That inflammatory rhetoric poured forth from every institution in the country—from the presidency, Congress, corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, academia, and the public school system. The mainstream media pounded home the narrative about unchanging black oppression. And even after the verdict, the White House (perhaps that name will be gone in another year) and the press have doubled down on the systemic racism conceit, despite the coordinated effort to convict among Minnesota’s public officials and the state’s most prestigious members of the private bar.

Going forward, it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a trial free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/doj-indicts-illinois-professor-secretly-working-china-while-getting-us-government-grants

The Justice Department indicted a Chinese-born Illinois college professor on two counts of wire fraud and a false statements charge for secretly working for a Chinese government-affiliated university and concealing those ties when applying for and receiving a $151,099 grant from the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation.

Mingqing Xiao, 59, was accused on Wednesday of “fraudulently” obtaining the federal grant money “by concealing support he was receiving from the Chinese government and a Chinese university” while he worked as a mathematics professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he has been employed since 2000. Prosecutors said Xiao “applied for and received NSF grant funds … without informing NSF about another, overlapping grant he had already received from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China” and “failed to inform NSF that he was on the payroll” of Shenzhen University.

“Again, an American professor stands accused of enabling the Chinese government’s efforts to corruptly benefit from U.S. research funding by lying about his obligations to, and support from, an arm of the Chinese government and a Chinese public university,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers said Wednesday.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-d-c-statehood-gambit-11619045039?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

A week after the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee introduced legislation to pack the Supreme Court by adding four new Justices, the House is set to vote on a bill to pack the U.S. Senate by adding two new Senators. Unlike court-packing, the bill granting statehood to Washington, D.C., has majority support among elected Democrats and the official backing of the White House. But the impetus behind both measures is the same—to tilt the constitutional playing field and consolidate liberal power.

Fashioning an independent seat of government in a federal system while affording representation to its residents is a dilemma dating to the founding. The Framers provided in the Constitution’s Article I that Congress could, “by cession of particular states,” control a small area in which the federal government would operate. In 1790 part of the territories of Virginia and Maryland, two of the 13 states that ratified the Constitution, were delineated for federal control.

Advocates of statehood brush aside the constitutional concerns and frame their cause as a simple question of democracy. It’s true that the roughly 700,000 residents of the District don’t have the ability to elect voting Members of Congress. Many hold influence over the federal government as employees and contractors or in other positions, and in the Founding era proximity to the seat of power was itself considered a form of representation.

Yet the natural remedy for the imperfect status quo, if representation is the real concern, would be for Congress to do something it has done before—return part of the District to the state that ceded it in the first place. That’s what happened in 1846 when Congress reinstated Virginia’s control over the D.C. suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-indicts-the-minneapolis-police-11619045332?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Derek Chauvin awaits his murder sentence at a Minnesota Correctional Facility, yet the federal government spared hardly a moment before shifting its scrutiny toward his former colleagues. A new Justice Department probe of the Minneapolis Police Department is targeting the city’s officers in an effort to prove the Democratic narrative of “systemic” police racism.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday announced a pattern-or-practice investigation of Minneapolis police. Federal investigators in coming months will examine the department’s record and policing methods. If they find behavior they dislike, they have the power to force reform of the department through a consent decree. Mr. Garland referred to the process as a matter of straightforward oversight, saying “good officers welcome accountability.”

Yet Minneapolis police are right to suspect that Washington is probing them with a foregone conclusion. In his address after Mr. Chauvin’s conviction Tuesday, President Biden said his Administration’s next step would be “confronting head-on systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing.” The man who drafted the 1994 crime bill that led to the arrest of countless black drug users is now claiming racism is endemic among American police.

Last May then-Attorney General William Barr launched a federal civil-rights probe into the death of George Floyd in police custody, and that investigation continues. But Democrats are now expanding the charge of wrongdoing to the entire department, seeking proof that Mr. Chauvin’s actions represent the culture of policing today. No matter that the Minneapolis police chief since 2017, Medaria Arradondo, testified for the prosecution in the Chauvin trial and has pushed to reform certain police practices like choke holds.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/21/how-much-ruin-do-we-have-left/

As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation’s well-being hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability. A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.

Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders.

The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy.

Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt.

The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The greater problem lies within us, as we erode the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually.

We are now witnessing a concentrated effort to alter the constitutional order and centuries of custom and tradition. The left believes that’s the only way it can retain its transient power, given the unpopularity of most of its current agenda.

A nation’s institutions are its bedrock. Yet, the Electoral College and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual states establishing voting laws are under assault.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/21/why-a-free-people-cannot-exist-without-free-speech/

Free speech is perhaps the most important liberty Americans enjoy. People exercise it every day without even thinking about it, and for good reason it is mentioned in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But free speech is more than just the words in the Bill of Rights. Before there was a law, there was the idea of free speech. The law limits the government to protect the right, but does not define the right.

More than simply a legal issue, free speech is a part of American culture—an important distinction. If free speech meant only the words in the Constitution, if all it guaranteed were that the government could not jail us for our words, it would be a dead letter. Governments across the world guarantee rights in their laws yet violate them daily.

Indeed, free speech was not invented in 1791. The law only codifies what the Founders and their contemporaries already believed: that a free people must be allowed to openly express themselves, and that the cure for bad ideas is good ideas, not censorship.

The First Amendment is essential, but the American people believe in the principle of free speech. That includes more than just being free of government punishment. It includes the idea that no power — be it government, corporation, or mob — should be able to suppress the free exchange of ideas.

We often speak of the “marketplace of ideas,” and just as with markets for goods, the concept came first, and laws to protect it followed. Now, the concept is under threat. Should it fail, and should deplatforming, monopoly pressures, and “heckler’s vetoes” become accepted practices, then no matter what the law says, free speech as a concept will die.

The English Roots of Free Speech

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/21/the_long_arm_of_the_law_reaches_into_your_cellphone.html

Bob Goodlatte (R) represented Virginia’s 6th Congressional District, served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and is senior policy adviser of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.Alex Marthews is the national chair of Restore the Fourth, an advocacy organization dedicated to privacy, surveillance reform and the Fourth Amendment.

Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, the government may be tricking your cellphone into divulging your movements, while seeing who you’ve texted and called.

Since 1995, local and state governments, as well as federal agencies, have been using “cell site simulators,” commonly known by the genericized brand name “stingrays.” These portable devices collect data from the cellphones of anyone who happens to walk into range of its signals.

Stingrays work by mimicking cellphone towers, sending signals to trick phones in a targeted area into transmitting the locations and identifying information from bystanders. Stingrays represent one of the largest bulk data collection programs in the United States, operating at all levels of government.

According to a 2018 American Civil Liberties Union investigation, at least 75 agencies in 27 states and the District of Columbia owned stingrays, with the potential to compromise the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans. When asked about stingrays, many law enforcement officials obfuscate. A police department in Florida admitted in emails to hiding its use of a stingray-type device. Often, the manufacturers of these devices, and sometimes the FBI, require police departments to sign non-disclosure agreements. Federal law enforcement will often push for dismissal of cases rather than reveal specifics about how these devices are used. In 2018, the ACLU reported that 14 federal agencies were known to utilize stingrays, including IRS, ICE and the FBI.

The decentralized nature of this technology makes investigation difficult. Hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests would need to be filed to uncover the scope of their use – and even then, past experience suggests these requests would often be ignored.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/04/21/eric_kaufmann_media_dems_ignore_facts_and_logic_as_they_push_racial_division.html

University of London professor Eric Kaufmann argues that media coverage of police brutality has steered people away from numbers and statistics on “FOX News Primetime.”

ERIC KAUFMANN: What this study finds is that people’s perception of racism and the reality of racism has been diverging, especially the past five years or so. So for example, what you see in the major newspapers like “The New York Times” or “The Washington Post,” there has been an explosion of the terms racist, white privilege, white supremacy, and so on, and that has been documented in terms of word counts.

That seems correlated with a big shift to the left in terms of, particularly white liberal attitudes on race. And what that seems to produce is a big, big distortion, again, of people’s perception of the size of this problem.

To give you a concrete example rooted in indisputable fact, I asked the question in my survey to both black and white respondents, what is more, which is the more likely cause of death for a young black man in America? Is it a car accident or is it to be shot by the police? It is a clear fact that it is about 10-1 with car accidents over a police bullet, and yet eight-in-ten African-American Biden voters and seven-in-ten whites who believe… white Republicans are racist actually said it was police that were more likely to be the cause of death for young black men. So this is leading people to have a distorted picture of reality. And that feeds into a whole series of political attitudes.

BEN DOMENECH: You know, Eric, I think this is a situation where so much of the media conversation, the focus on these stories, which are truly tragic and terrifying and horrible, has created this outsized feeling that this is something that happens on a daily basis in America. We have heard from the president tonight about systemic racism being this virulent strain that runs through American life.

What can be done to reset this and try to get back to what the facts actually are about the level of this problem in America?