RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/schumer-and-pelosi-would-deny-americans-freedom-terence-p-jeffrey/

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were ferocious advocates of religious freedom — when the question revolved around consuming peyote.

In the 1980s, as the Supreme Court’s summary would later explain in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, a “private drug rehabilitation organization” in Oregon fired two employees “because they ingested peyote.”

These employees, however, did not ingest the drug for recreational purposes. They did it, the court’s summary explained, “for sacramental purposes at a ceremony of their Native American Church.”

Even so, Oregon denied the two unemployment payments “under a state law disqualifying employees discharged for work-related ‘misconduct.'” 

The issue for the Supreme Court: Was Oregon violating the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion?

In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court ruled it was not.

“We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate,” the court stated.

“Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes),” said the court.

https://spectator.us/topic/inquiry-january-6-capitol-brian-sicknick-truth/

I support Nancy Pelosi’s call for a ‘9/11-style inquiry’ into the mêlée at the Capitol on January 6. I do so not because I think there is any valid analogy between the terrorist attack on the United States by Muslim fanatics on September 11, 2001 and the low-level riot at the Capitol. There isn’t. On 9/11 some 3,000 innocent people were murdered, billions of dollars of property was obliterated and important symbols of American economic and military might were attacked, utterly destroyed in the case of the World Trade Towers, seriously damaged in the case of the Pentagon. On January 6, a pro-Trump rally got out of hand despite the president’s instructions to proceed to the Capitol ‘peacefully and patriotically’.

Despite the chasm-like discrepancy between the events, Democrats instantly seized upon the riot, elevated it into an ‘armed insurrection’, and bewailed the assault on ‘our democracy’.

Indeed, so quick was the construction of this narrative that the cynics among us speculated that the riot, if not exactly premeditated by anti-Trump forces, was at least foreseen as an exploitable possibility. Something similar can be said about the deployment of the phrase ‘our democracy’. In this case, the first-person-plural possessive is very clearly intended to be exclusive, not inclusive. No one wearing a MAGA hat or waving a Trump banner is included in that ‘our’. The thousands of loyalty-tested National Guard troops and the tall, razor-wire-tipped fence hastily erected to surround the Capitol communicated the same message. It’s Us vs Them, comrade: talk about ‘unity’ and ‘our democracy’ but practice division and exclusion. Nancy Pelosi called the Capitol ‘the people’s house’, the ‘citadel of democracy’, but the armed troops and the fence bespoke a different reality.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-non-covid-spending-blowout-11613937485?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“No wonder Democrats want to pass all this on a partisan vote. It’s a progressive blowout for the ages that does little for the economy but will finance Democratic interest groups for years. Please don’t call it Covid relief.”

The Biden White House is pointing to polls showing that its $1.9 trillion spending bill is popular, and the press corps is cheering. Yet we wonder how much public support there’d be if Americans understood that most of the blowout is a list of longtime Democratic spending priorities flying under the false flag of Covid-19 relief.

Let’s dig into the various House committee bills to separate the Covid from the chaff. The Covid cash includes some $75 billion for vaccinations, treatments, testing and medical supplies. There’s also $19 billion for “public health,” primarily for state health departments and community health centers. One might even count the $6 billion to the Indian Health Service, or $4 billion for mental health.

The package also hands more to businesses and individuals most hit by lockdowns. That includes $7.2 billion more for the Paycheck Protection Program, $15 billion for economic injury disaster loans, $26 billion for restaurants, bars and live venues, and $15 billion in payroll support for airlines. The recipients of this taxpayer money will at least be required to prove economic harm, and in some cases repay loans.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/paging-judge-gershon-can-new-york-cut-ties/91425/

It looks like Mayor de Blasio has flinched from abruptly closing the skating rinks operated by the Trump Organization. Hizzoner had announced they would be shut down before the Trump contract ended. It was to be a protest against President Trump’s speech January 6, even though the Senate determined that Mr. Trump wasn’t guilty of incitement. It seems, though, an outcry by skaters turned the mayor around.

“New York City kids deserve all the time on the ice they can get this year,” the New York Times quotes the mayor’s press secretary, Bill Neidhardt, as saying. “The Wollman and Lasker rinks will stay open under current management for the few weeks left in this season. But make no mistake, we will not be doing business with the Trump Organization going forward.” Nice to see the mayor come to his senses.

Ordinarily we might not write about this, but it happens to be the issue on which we started covering Mr. Trump. That was in July 2015, after the New York tycoon who would become the 45th president and his wife Melania descended the golden escalator at Trump tower to declare he would run for the GOP nomination in 2016. The City Council lit up with the idea of ending the city’s contracts with the Trump Organization.

We found that shocking. We wrote about it at the time in the New York Post. The idea of severing business ties to Mr. Trump was being pressed by the then speaker of the Council, Melissa Mark-Viverito. There had been no finding of wrongdoing by any authority. There had been no legal proceeding. She just didn’t like his position on immigration. Neither did we, but we liked the City Council overreach even less.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-ignore-desantiss-minority-outreach-to-smear-florida-vaccine-effort/

On a cool Valentine’s Day in northern Florida, more than 500 people braved heavy rain to get COVID-19 vaccination shots at St. Paul AME Church in Jacksonville.

The vaccination event was part of the annual Founder’s Day celebration for the church, which is located in one of the most heavily Democratic voting precincts in the city, said the church’s pastor, Marvin Clyde Zanders II. Despite the rain, he said, it was “very well orchestrated.”

The vaccination event at St. Paul AME is one of more than 50 vaccination events that have been held at churches and recreation centers over the last few weeks in a concerted effort to get more shots in the arms of Floridians living in underserved communities.

The events have been spearheaded by the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the Department of Health, at the direction of the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. More than 42,000 people have been vaccinated at the one-day clinics, according to the DOE.

“Our communities need access to the vaccine, and I think there is an effort to get it done,” Zanders said, “because all are vulnerable. Every individual that’s a human is vulnerable.”

Those efforts to vaccinate people in underserved Florida communities were largely ignored by most mainstream media outlets this past week during a flap over a pop-up vaccination event at a wealthy community along the state’s Gulf Coast. During the three-day pop-up event, 3,000 doses of vaccine were administered in a planned community with a large number of seniors called Lakewood Ranch in Manatee County, just south of St. Petersburg.

Democrats charged that DeSantis was playing politics with vaccine distribution, and favoring white, wealthy Republicans. State Representative Michele Rayner, a St. Petersburg Democrat, accused the governor of prioritizing “affluent neighborhoods in Manatee County over our underserved populations.” Niki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and the only Democrat elected to statewide office, accused DeSantis of “rationing vaccines based on political influence.”

DeSantis, with his pugnacious style, fired back that the community – which is below the statewide average for vaccinated seniors – should be “thankful” that it was receiving an additional 3,000 vaccine doses, on top of its regular allocation.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

I’ve written and spoken at length over the past several years about the dangers of vesting the power in the state, or in tech monopolies, to determine what is true and false, or what constitutes permissible opinion and what does not. I will not repeat those points here.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/20/31-days-in-democrats-havent-accomplished-a-single-covid-promise-to-the-american-worker/

The Democratic Party woke up Saturday morning to its 31st day of leading both the executive and legislative branches of government. They had run on “immediate [economic] relief” to Americans put down and out by largely Democratic COVID shutdowns. Relief, you might notice, that hasn’t actually come.

On Jan. 14, less than one week before taking the oath of office, President Joe Biden promised, “We’ll make sure that our emergency small business relief is distributed swiftly and equitably, unlike the first time around. We’re going to focus on small businesses, on Main St. We’ll focus on minority-owned small businesses, women-owned small businesses.”

But so far in the first full month that Sen. Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Biden have been in control, the only money that has gone toward American relief has been from that money allocated while President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell still joined Pelosi in power, including $1 trillion that remains unspent.

Instead of their promised relief, over the past month Democrats have tried the former president, re-entered the Paris Climate Accords, locked down the U.S. Capitol, and freed up American tax dollars to go to aborting children abroad.

So what about American business owners, parents, and workers suffering under COVID-19 restrictions? Anything for them? So far nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. President Joe Biden has mandated masks on busses, for example, and Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed credit for the Trump administration’s vaccine development. Biden has also established a COVID board, created a COVID task force, developed a COVID plan, reviewed COVID, assessed COVID, and held a COVID town hall. Lovely.

“Our rescue plan will provide flexible grants to help those hardest-hit small businesses survive the pandemic,” Biden promised more than five weeks ago. His administration, he said, would “help entrepreneurs of all backgrounds create and maintain jobs, plus provide the essential goods and services communities depend upon.”

Instead, at this week’s CNN town hall Biden told Wisconsin brewer Tim Eichinger, a Democrat who is struggling to keep his employees on and his business afloat, to give White House staff his address so they could mail him that COVID plan — the one he laid out five weeks ago. It’s the same one Democrats have been sitting on for a month while they fight over things like a $15 national minimum wage hike unlikely to pass the Senate and which even the president admits likely isn’t going anywhere.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/with_libraries_like_these_who_needs_to_burn_books.html

Why burn books when libraries are doing the censor’s work?  On January 25, 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) Council reviewed the role of libraries in condemning white supremacy and fascism.

Lindsay Cronk, who helped develop a resolution to “condemn white supremacy and fascism as antithetical to library work,” believes this work to be “urgent.”  Cronk bases this assessment on the January 6 attack in D.C.

Just a little more than two weeks ago, a mob, inflamed by misinformation and disinformation in the form of ideological rhetoric and carrying fascist and white supremacist symbols including nazi swastikas and confederate flags, attempted to interrupt and counteract democratic process.  They were emboldened by inaction from American institutions.

Facts be damned as Cronk continues.

Furthermore, “Over the course of consecutive ALA conferences, white allies have interrogated our fragility, and we’ve had experts provide a vision of how we can become an antiracist profession. We’ve  listened to and amplified the voices of our colleagues of color enough to acknowledge that diversity is not the solution to racism or fascism.”

Finally, in impeccable radical leftist language, the ALA wants to explore “how we can do intellectual freedom and social justice work together.”

In order to “disrupt whiteness in libraries and librarianship,” the following titles are recommended.

Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Duke University Press.
Crenshaw, K., N. Gotanda, and K. Thomas. (1996). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press.
Zuberi, T. and E. Bonilla-Silva. (2008). White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. Rowman & Littlefield.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/20/biden-fires-chicago-u-s-attorney-hot-on-the-trail-of-democratic-corruption-n1427040

You’ve probably never heard of Chicago’s U.S. attorney John Lausch. For the last two years, he has been going after some of the biggest, most powerful Democrats in the state of Illinois.

His office indicted a Chicago alderman who had been serving since 1969. Edward Burke had been in the crosshairs of prosecutors for four decades but it wasn’t until Lausch came into office that he was indicted.

Then there’s the case of the most powerful state politician in the United States, Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. His aides and cronies have been indicted for various crimes of influence over the years and Lausch has now set his sights on Madigan himself.

In fact, it’s believed Lausch has targeted some other high-profile Democratic politicians in other investigations. It’s a target-rich environment and Democrats in Illinois have gotten extremely nervous about who Lausch will go after next.

Now it appears, that bringing down corrupt Democratic politicians will be the job of the next U.S. attorney. Along with 56 other U.S. attorneys named by former president Trump, Lausch will lose his job — fired by Joe Biden. “It’s tradition,” said Biden supporters. This is true. But it’s also “tradition” to keep prosecutors in place who were pursuing high-profile cases. Lausch certainly qualified under that criteria.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/20/can-the-truth-set-us-free/

I try to re-read The Confessions (the one by St. Augustine, not the one by Rousseau) every Lent. Since it is that time of year again, and since I am rather weary of the usual quotidian static, I thought I would avert my gaze from the armed camp on the Potomac and say a word or two about my reading. In a famous passage of Book XI of that deep and magisterial book, Augustine asks a simple but apparently imponderable question: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is,” he says, “provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”

It is hard to read that passage without experiencing a shock of recognition.

There is a basic sense in which, like St. Augustine, we all know what time is. As Einstein once observed, time is “what the clock measures.” Any yet it is impossible not to feel that that answer, though correct, is somehow insufficient to the awesome reality of time—assuming, that is, that time is or has a reality and is not, as some philosophers have insisted, an illusion we contribute to make experience comprehensible.

When Plato described time as “the moving image of eternity,” his formulation was more poetic than Einstein’s, but not necessarily more satisfactory. The fact is that time, like many basic concepts, names an idea we are perfectly familiar with but that we may not be able to explain.

Consider the concept of truth.

There is an important sense in which we all know what truth is. We just couldn’t get along in the world if we didn’t. But being able to apply a concept in daily life does not necessarily mean we can define it. Or that we really understand it.

Medieval philosophers defined truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei”: a “correspondence between thought and thing.”

That sounds impressive, especially in Latin, and it has a certain intuitive appeal. When we utter a true proposition—“2 + 2 = 4,” say, or “Snow is white”—we can see that there is a correspondence between our judgment and the state of affairs it names.

But what, exactly, is the nature of that “correspondence”?