RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-activists-politicians-ignore-evidence-rush-to-conclusions-in-makhia-bryant-shooting/

Hours after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on Tuesday, media and activists tried to cram the police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant into a pre-ordained narrative box, taking advantage of the incident’s proximity to Chauvin’s conviction to cast the shooting of an armed teenager, who was in the act of stabbing someone, as yet another example of the kind of brutality visited upon George Floyd.

Columbus police responded to a 911 call on Tuesday evening to find a group of teenage girls in a physical altercation in a suburban front yard. Body-camera footage shows that an unnamed officer exited his vehicle and commanded the brawling girls to “get down” before shooting 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant four times. Freeze-frame images  show that Bryant was swinging her knife toward another African-American girl in a pink sweatsuit as she was shot.

“She had a knife. She just ran at her,” the officer can be heard saying.

Hazel Bryant, who identified herself as the victim’s aunt, confirmed to The Columbus Dispatch that her niece did have a knife, but said she dropped it before being shot — an anecdote picked up and widely reported by national media, including the New York Times, before the body-camera footage had been released.

Columbus mayor Andrew J. Ginther, a Democrat, called the events “a horrible, heartbreaking situation” in a press conference, adding that the footage was quickly released in the interest of “transparency.”

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/04/21/packing-the-court-then-and-now/

Not every war is won on the battlefield or ends with a surrender ceremony. Some are won quietly, sometimes before the killing starts, when the weaker side backs down because it expects to lose. The victory is achieved by intimidation and credible threats.

That is exactly what happened with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme in 1937. Unfortunately, the nature of his victory, and even the fact that he won, is widely misunderstood. Most commentators blathering on TV or the internet about current court-packing proposals actually think Roosevelt lost because he failed to add additional justices to the Supreme Court.

In fact, the president won because he got what he really cared about: acceptance of his major policy initiatives as constitutionally proper. The sitting justices listened to FDR’s threats, recognized his enormous political power after a sweeping election victory, and caved in. Then, one by one, the most conservative justices retired, allowing Roosevelt to reshape the court without adding to the existing nine members.

Why does Roosevelt’s victory still matter? For two reasons. First, it matters because progressives are trying to pack the court once again. And although their effort is unlikely to succeed (as they now realize), it is animated by the hope that, once again, the threat of court-packing will intimidate sitting justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, who has repeatedly shown he wants to avoid any conflict with the president or Congress. The recent clamor could also intimidate President Biden’s new judicial commission, pushing its members to recommend packing the lower courts. (More on that later.)

Second, it matters because Roosevelt’s court-packing episode was crucial to the reconfiguration of American politics, particularly the growth of the centralized state. That growth was only possible because the Supreme Court bent to Roosevelt’s demands and approved his regulatory programs. No issue is more important today. That is especially true now that the Biden administration is attempting yet another vast extension of federal power, the largest since President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/20/enemy-of-the-people-minneapolis-star-tribune-publishes-biographical-information-of-derek-chauvin-trial-jurors/

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is being blasted online for releasing biographical information of all twelve jurors plus two alternates in the Derek Chauvin trial in the killing of George Floyd.

Without naming the jurors, reporters Paul Walsh and Hannah Sayle on Tuesday published enough details about their lives, internet sleuths and local snoops may be able to figure out who they are.

Walsh is a general assignment reporter at the Star-Tribune, and Sayle is a digital features editor. Online critics are accusing the paper of trying to intimidate the jurors into reaching a guilty verdict.

The reporters provided general information about the jurors’ ages, race, professions, where they’re from, and where they went to school. They even leaked that one juror is related to an area police officer.

Abby Simone, the “public safety” editor for the Star-Tribune, shared the story on Twitter.

“Why does the “public safety editor” think it’s ok to publish enough information to identify these jurors?” asked one Twitter user.

Some Twitter users like former Trump Campaign advisor Steve Cortes and conservative journalist Rachel Bovard argued that the article was clearly designed to intimidate the jury.

“Why are you making it easier to dox, harass, and threaten jurors?” asked Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor. “Do you want the mob to come for them? Do you have no journalistic integrity?”

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

Rarely do the generation experiencing the actual events and decisions that lead to their nation’s demise fully appreciate the enormity of their oversight until sometime after their culture’s destruction has been rendered incurable.  Largely, it is not due so much to their negligence as it is to most of them being too preoccupied with simply living and making a living.

Perhaps that would explain why, in just the first four months of 2021, the Supreme Court issued four decisions — or, perhaps better viewed as non-decisions — that should have caused all legitimately patriotic Americans to be alarmed and called to action…but did not seem to. 

Only a few weeks ago, without offering any substantive explanation, the Court summarily refused to even look at — much less seriously consider — any of the evidence of the 2020 election irregularities offered by attorney Sidney Powell and others.  Evidently, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was not interested in doing what it could — and should — to let America know decisively whether or not its presidential election had been shamelessly stolen by those now in power.

Why would they not do this?

Perhaps the answer is best revealed by the fact that, at the same time, the Court was also apparently too busy to halt a New York prosecutor from obtaining former president Trump’s tax returns.  The practical effect was for SCOTUS to give that prosecutor an assist with his unconstitutional effort to search for any crime that might make President Trump’s ouster from office permanent.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17302/derek-chauvin-conviction-supreme-court

The Minnesota appellate courts might not reverse the conviction but the United States Supreme Court well might, as they have done in other cases involving jury intimidation.

In seeking to put her thumb on the scales of justice, Rep. Maxine Waters perhaps unwittingly borrowed a tactic right out of the Deep South of the early 20th century.

In the Deep South during the 1920s and ’30s, elected politicians would organize demonstrations by white voters in front of courthouses in which racially charged trials were being conducted. The politicians then threatened, explicitly or implicitly, that violence would follow the acquittal of a black defendant or the conviction of a white defendant. The U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts reversed several convictions based on these tactics of intimidation.

The judge in the Chauvin trial made a serious error in not sequestering the jury during the entire trial.

Already, we have seen blood sprayed over the former home of a witness who testified for Chauvin; the defendant’s lawyers have received threats. An aura of violence is in the air. Jurors breathe that same air….

This is not the Deep South in the 1920s. It is the “Identity Politics” of the 21st century. But the motives of the protesters are not relevant to whether jurors in the Chauvin case could be expected to consider the evidence objectively without fear of the kind of intimidation threatened by Waters.

The evidence, in my view, supports a verdict of manslaughter, but not of murder. Any verdict that did not include a conviction for murder was likely to be unacceptable to Waters and her followers, however, even if the facts and the law mandate that result. Waters is not interested in neutral justice. She wants vengeance for what she and her followers justifiably see as the unjustified killing of George Floyd…. That is not the rule of law. That is the passion of the crowd.

We must be certain that threats of intimidation do not influence jury verdicts. That certainty does not exist now in the Chauvin case, thanks largely to the ill-advised threats and demands of Maxine Waters and others.

The convictions of Derek Chauvin might not mark the end of this racially divisive case. The US Supreme Court might ultimately decide whether to uphold the convictions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/dc-blm-insurrectionists-get-pass-daniel-greenfield/

The face of the Black Lives Matter insurrectionist who was arrested in Washington D.C. with an axe, a laser, and a “destructive device” will not be plastered by the FBI over any local billboards. 

The BLM insurrections who rioted in Washington D.C. over the death of Daunte Wright, who had choked a woman to steal her rent money, threw fireworks and heavy objects at police. They shone lasers in the eyes of police officers and vandalized the Columbus monument with the obscene and hateful graffiti of a racist black supremacist movement. And they’ll get a pass.

Even when the racist insurrectionist mob chanted, “burn the precinct to the ground.” 

While the D.C. police department has asked for the public’s helpin identifying one of the BLM insurrections who attacked a police officer and is offering a reward, the national media has not picked up the story the way that it did when there was an effort underway to identify the Capitol rioters, nor has the FBI taken to buying billboards asking anyone who knows the thug for tips.

Fighting with a police officer in January was profoundly morally different than doing so in April. 

That’s all the more striking since the D.C. Metro police force is 52% black, while the Capitol Police are 29% black. Black lives don’t matter when they’re also blue. Just ask Captain Dorn.

Only a handful of months after the media agonized over the spectacle of a riot in D.C. and our political class acted as if fights between protesters and police was some inexplicably horrifying event, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor put together, instead of the top outdoor sport of 2020, it’s okay to riot in D.C., assault government buildings, and call for burning them down.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/derek-chauvin-convicted-but-what-comes-next/

“Nevertheless, there is a serious question about whether Derek Chauvin got a fair trial. That is a separate question from whether the evidence was compelling. And to be sure, the stronger the evidence, the harder it is to show that due process was denied. A reviewing court is apt to conclude that even exemplary due process would not have made a difference.”

While the guilty verdicts are rational and defensible, the speedy nature of the decision could lead to problems for prosecutors in the appellate process.

D erek Chauvin has been convicted on all three counts.

For those who’ve watched the Chauvin trial, the only quick verdict that seemed rationally possible was a verdict of guilty. While I’ve been more skeptical than most commentators about the intent proof on the two murder counts (felony murder and depraved-indifference homicide), I thought the evidence on the manslaughter count — “culpable negligence,” for which it is unnecessary for prosecutors to prove criminal intent — was daunting.

Consequently, if we are sticking just to the testimony in the trial, it would be implausible — I’m tempted to say, impossible — that a rapid acquittal could have been defended as rational.

As things have turned out, the jury deliberated for less than a day. As this is written, the reporting indicates that the jury submitted no notes to the court to ask questions about the record, to request to hear any testimony reread, to seek any finer-point guidance on the law that controls the case. (I am hedging about the reporting because some matters in the case, particularly those involving the jury, have not been public.)

Word that the jury had so quickly reached a verdict signaled that Chauvin would be convicted.

The logic of the quick verdict is defensible. If the jury started with the felony-murder charge, Count One, they would have needed to find that Chauvin’s restraint and subdual of George Floyd evolved into a criminal assault. To convert what began as a lawful detention into a criminal assault, the jury would have focused on the fact that, for several minutes after Floyd had stopped breathing and lost his pulse, Chauvin maintained the back-and-neck hold — even for a minute after the ambulance arrived.