RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-derek-chauvin-a-racist-murderer

I am neither a criminologist nor pathologist nor coroner nor police officer. However, from what it would seem to me, Derek Chauvin should spend a good deal of the rest of his life in prison for the murder of George Floyd. However much fentanyl or meth Floyd had in him that night, no one will seriously argue that Floyd was about to keel over that night on his own.

Furthermore I hope Chauvin serves as a harbinger of change. It is gruesome that a person can end up at the mercy of a police officer and be killed in a flash, by someone who almost always walks away innocent, let off according to legal niceties that allow that cops may do hideous things under pressure but that’s just the way it goes.

However, the good-thinking consensus here is that I am leaving something out.

I am supposed to be deeply aggrieved that George Floyd died because he was black. Chauvin, I am supposed to think, murdered Floyd at least partly out a disregard for black lives – or, to use the term of art these days, bodies. This is supposed to be about race.

It is perhaps the most heretical belief I hold these days that I don’t think so. However, I use the term heretical with some irony.

* * *

The cops kill hundreds and hundreds of people every year. Of them, white people are the majority by a good margin. For every incident we hear of where cops kill a black person, there are multiple others where cops killed a white person and we did not hear about it.

Black people, however, are killed more than what our proportion of the population would predict in itself. Specifically, black people are killed at a rate two and a half times our representation in the population.

The good word is that this “proves” that racism is behind the killings of black people. Presumably racist bias, even subconscious, makes cops pull the trigger in tense situations.

This is an understandable approach, but not truth incarnate, and it leaves something out.

https://worldisraelnews.com/new-york-teens-launch-attack-on-jewish-man-one-bites-policeman/?utm_source=

This incident follows a much more serious attack on Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight.

A teen with two younger friends spat and threw garbage at a Jewish man in Brooklyn, New York Thursday evening, with the leader of the pack arrested after biting the policeman who confronted them.

The three got into an argument with the man, the police said, and reacted with violence. The authorities caught up to them quickly after being called, and the 13-year-old ringleader caused the officer minor injuries when challenged. Her younger companions were not taken into custody.

This incident follows a much more serious attack Wednesday, when an ex-convict knifed a young hasidic couple and their baby in broad daylight in lower Manhattan.

On Friday, New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told CNN that the man, who had just been paroled a month ago after serving time for attempted murder, actually targeted the toddler after passing the visibly Jewish family on the sidewalk.

“Stop and listen to this slowly: He slashes the mom, slashes the dad and then intentionally stabs a child, a 1-year-old girl in a stroller,” Shea said. “Where’s the outrage? Something is clearly broken here. It’s a crisis.”

The family, visiting from Belgium, all suffered cuts to the head and face, some of which needed stitching. The alleged attacker, 30-year-old Darryl Jones, is being held without bail on several charges, including attempted murder, assault, and drug possession.

Even though he uttered nothing anti-Semitic during the attack, the mother told the New York Daily News that she was sure of his motive.

“This was a horrible hate crime,” she said. “There were more people in that park, but he came to attack us because we are Jewish.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/03/the-appeal-of-the-new-totalitarians/

I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom. 

It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote? 

I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.) 

This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. Quite apart from its illuminating historical analysis, the book is a plea to turn away from the politicization of everything that stands behind such phenomena as sports concessions and airlines—to say nothing of Hollywood, the media, and the fount of it all, academia—insinuating politics into every dimension of life. “The choice here,” Soukup writes in his conclusion, “is simple.”

If we, as a civilization allow even the spirit of capitalism to become part of “the political” and part of the total state, then we will have order—for however long that lasts. If we resist the politicization of business and of capital markets, however; if we determine for ourselves that disorder and depoliticization are the preferable options, then we not only preserve liberty but also preserve the spirit of innovation and expression that harnesses liberty to create wealth and prosperity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/biden-infrastructure-plan-spends-more-electric-daniel-greenfield/

Biden and Buttigieg have been trying to sell their “infrastructure” plan by talking about all the roads, and bridges they want to repair. Much the same as Obama claimed that he wanted to repair all the roads and bridges.

Oddly, or not so oddly, the roads and bridges never get repaired. Maybe that’s because that amounts to only about 5% of Biden’s $2 trillion whopper.

Just $115 billion, or roughly 5.6% of total spending, would go toward modernizing 20,000 miles of highways, roads and main streets that are “in most critical need of repair,” as well as repairing the most “economic significant large bridges” and roughly 10,000 smaller bridges, according to a fact sheet released by the White House. 

Meanwhile, a whole lot more is going to the electric car industry. Specifically, $174 billion.

Biden’s infrastructure plan spends a whole lot more on lefty electric car industries than on fixing all the roads he claims to want to repair.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/03/questions-the-media-should-ask-president-biden-about-his-call-for-economic-sanctions-on-georgia/

Given that the United States President has, for the first time in American history, called for an economic boycott and economic sanctions of a member state over dutifully and legally passed legislation, a reader passed along questions he’d like to see the White House press ask of the administration they claim to cover. The questions refer to President Joe Biden’s call for an economic boycott of Georgia over its decision to pass SB202, which will put into place mild election integrity reforms.

Q: Seeing that over the past year, almost 50 percent of small, black-owned business in America have closed for good and seeing how African Americans make up 55 percent of Atlanta, 54 percent of Savannah, and 55 percent of Augusta (where The Masters is played), does President Biden still think calling for an economic boycott and punishment by private companies on all Georgia citizens is a good idea? And will he now call for boycotts of The Masters, the Atlanta Braves, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Atlanta Hawks along with UGA & GA Tech. football? Why or why not?

Q: Does President Biden keep a list of other pieces of state and local legislation of which he does not approve? And over the next few years, if any of that legislation happens to pass and is signed into law, will he always publicly call for an economic boycott/sanctions by private companies so he may punish the local population for what he personally decides are their errors?

https://spectator.us/topic/woke-capitalism-comes-georgia-china-boycott-coca-cola/

Awave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America. The latest example comes courtesy of CEOs being forced to weigh in on SB-202, a Georgia bill to restructure mechanisms of the state’s voting procedures and laws. Spurred on by President Biden — a man seemingly guided by his Very Online chief of staff, who takes his cues from Twitter hashtag campaigns from the likes of the pedophile-enabling Lincoln Project — celebrities and companies are lining up to demand boycotts of Georgia, labeling the new law inhumane and an abuse of basic human rights.

While appearing on CNBC, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey called SB-202 ‘unacceptable’ and ‘a step backward’. He said the company would work to remedy the legislation, through both public and private advocacy. Quincey was born in the United Kingdom, but as a resident of Atlanta he is certainly welcome to his opinion on SB-202. However his virtue-signaling is surface-level.

In March 2020, a Congressional Executive Commission on human-rights abuses in Xinjiang listed Coca-Cola as a major American company with ties to forced labor camps in the Chinese province. Other companies on the list included Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell’s Soup Company, CostCo, H&M (who has since distanced themselves from China and paid a price for it), Patagonia and Tommy Hilfiger. The report went on to specifically name Coca-Cola’s COFO Tunhe sugar facility in Xinjiang as having direct ties to forced labor. It was reported in the New York Times in November of last year that Coca-Cola was one of the primary companies lobbying against congressional legislation targeting companies who engaged with China’s forced labor policies. The New York Times piece said ‘Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China.’

Quincey will likely not have to answer for these corporate hypocrisies while appearing on friendly media outlets who also do not want to see Chinese threats to their valuable media markets.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-now-he-tell-us-hunter-biden-talks

For months Hunter Biden has maintained strict silence about allegations involving his business dealings in Ukraine and China, both when his father was vice president and after. Nothing could make him talk. But now, he’s submitting to media interviews, probably several of them. What changed? The younger Biden now has a book to sell. That’ll do it every time.

In his first interview, with CBS Sunday Morning, Biden admits that the laptop that was the subject of reporting in the New York Post in the final weeks of the presidential campaign could, in fact, be his. Remember that Biden’s defenders denounced the story as “Russian disinformation,” social media giants Twitter and Facebook suppressed it, and many big media organizations did their best to ignore it. Now, though, with a book to sell, Biden says it “certainly” could have been his laptop.

In a true tease, CBS has released just a snippet of the interview between Biden and correspondent Tracy Smith. Here is the entirety of that exchange:

SMITH: Was that your laptop?
BIDEN: For real, I don’t know.
SMITH: I know, but you know this —
BIDEN: I really don’t know what the answer is. That’s the truthful answer.
SMITH: You don’t know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?
BIDEN: I don’t, I have no idea whether —
SMITH: So it could have been yours?
BIDEN: Of course, certainly. There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mississippi-texas-not-seeing-cases-mask-mandates

Mississippi and Texas are defying the national trend of rising COVID-19 cases, despite the fact that they eliminated mask mandates and other restrictions in March.

Gov. Tate Reeves lifted the mask mandate in Mississippi on March 3, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott followed on March 10.

Cases have fallen in Mississippi from a seven-day average of 465 on March 13 to 211 on April 1. In Texas, the current seven-day average is 3,688, down from 4,461 on March 16.

President Joe Biden was harsh in his criticism of the states’ decisions at the time.

“The last thing — the last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters,” Biden said.

One possible reason that the states have seen declining cases even as the pandemic has worsened in states such as Michigan and New Jersey is that the variant from the United Kingdom, known as B.1.1.7, has not yet spread through Mississippi and Texas as it has in other states. That variant is estimated to be 40% to 70% more transmissible than the original virus.

“The reason you’re not seeing a rise in states in the South is that the variant did not seed there as it did in the North,” said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician at the Rollins School of Public Health. “It is almost certain that we will see the same rise in the South that we are seeing in the North.”

The first known cases of the U.K. variant in the United States were reported in Colorado and California.

On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said that the U.K. variant now accounted for 26% of new cases and was the predominant strain in five regions — but she did not specify which regions. Chances are that Mississippi and Texas are not in those regions. Confirmed cases of the variant in Mississippi are about 1.3 per 100,000 population, and in Texas, it is 1.4. By comparison, in New Jersey, it is about 4.4 per 100,000, in Colorado, it is 8.1. and in Michigan, it is 12.4. In California, where cases have been declining, variant cases are 2.1 per 100,000.

It is also likely that much of the population in Mississippi and Texas are still wearing masks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/defiant-federal-judge-calls-out-the-media-democrat-complex/

One D.C. Circuit jurist pulled no punches as he sounded the alarm on ‘one-party control of the press and media.’

‘T he flak only gets heavy when you’re over the target.” This oft-cited World War II fighter-pilot wisdom is the best way to understand the strident reaction to Judge Laurence Silberman, the formidable senior jurist on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as a result of the dissent he filed in a recent libel case.

In the course of controversially urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the foundation of its modern libel jurisprudence, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Judge Silberman had the audacity to notice that the mainstream media function as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. When this development is combined with the activist progressivism of Silicon Valley techies who control social-media platforms, the result, he concluded, is “one-party control of the press and media.” This “threat to a viable democracy” is apt to lead “to countervailing extremism” — hard to argue with that these days.

Silberman’s point was that, without constitutional justification, the Supreme Court’s judicially legislated federalization of libel law substantially enhanced the power of the press. New York Times v. Sullivan supplanted the traditional state common law of defamation with a rule, speciously claimed to be mandated by the First Amendment, that requires defamed public figures to prove actual malice — i.e., to prove that any libelous statements were intentionally false or made with reckless disregard for their falsity. This daunting burden makes it virtually impossible for public figures — including private persons who are transmogrified into celebrities by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence — to sue successfully, even in cases where they have been slandered with false information.

This might not be a terrible result if the media were scrupulously non-partisan. But once the media and other channels of information exchange become adjuncts of one political party, the Court’s standard creates an incentive to portray the opposition party in the worst light, knowing that any misimpressions thereby created and any reputational damage will not be actionable.

More to the point, whatever one thinks of the policy choice that it is better to encourage more reporting, rather than accurate reporting — such choices are for legislatures to make, not the courts.