RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-trump-isnt-guilty-of-incitement-11610303966?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

House Democrats have drafted an article of impeachment that accuses President Trump of “incitement to insurrection.” Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said Thursday that his office is “looking at all actors here and anyone that had a role” in the Capitol riot. Some reporters have construed that as including Mr. Trump.

The president didn’t commit incitement or any other crime. I should know. As a Washington prosecutor I earned the nickname “protester prosecutor” from the antiwar group CodePink. In one trial, I convicted 31 protesters who disrupted congressional traffic by obstructing the Capitol Crypt. In another, I convicted a CodePink activist who smeared her hands with fake blood, charged at then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a House hearing room, and incited the audience to seize the secretary of state physically. In other cases, I dropped charges when the facts fell short of the legal standard for incitement. One such defendant was the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.

Hostile journalists and lawmakers have suggested Mr. Trump incited the riot when he told a rally that Republicans need to “fight much harder.” Mr. Trump suggested the crowd walk to the Capitol: “We’re going to cheer on brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

In the District of Columbia, it’s a crime to “intentionally or recklessly act in such a manner to cause another person to be in reasonable fear” and to “incite or provoke violence where there is a likelihood that such violence will ensue.” This language is based on Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court set the standard for speech that could be prosecuted without violating the First Amendment. The justices held that a Ku Klux Klan leader’s calls for violence against blacks and Jews were protected speech. The court found that Clarence Brandenburg’s comments were “mere advocacy” of violence, not “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action . . . likely to incite or produce such action.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16935/senate-trial-trump

Some pundits and Senators have suggested that a former President can be impeached and tried as a private citizen. I don’t know if they think this applies to all former presidents, including Clinton, Carter, Bush and Obama, or whether it is applicable only to a president, like Trump, who has just recently left office. But either way, they are simply wrong as a matter of the Constitutional text and meaning.

The relevant text of the Constitution reads as follows: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (Article II, Section 4)

The Framers of the Constitution debated impeachment extensively. It is clear that they intended it to apply only to sitting presidents and other office holders and not to private citizens who previously held that office.

The Framers did, however, regard impeachment and trial as part of one single process, culminating in removal from office. And so, if removal from office is no longer a possibility, it would seem that Congress would have no jurisdiction to impeach.

What they want to do is to impeach President Trump without giving him an opportunity to defend himself at a Senate trial. This would be analogous to a prosecutor deciding to indict someone and then deny him a trial at which he could disprove his guilt or prove his innocence. That would be a core denial of due process, as would impeaching a president based on a majority of the House while denying him a trial in the Senate that requires a two-thirds super majority to remove.

Some pundits and Senators have suggested that a former President can be impeached and tried as a private citizen. I don’t know if they think this applies to all former presidents, including Clinton, Carter, Bush and Obama, or whether it is applicable only to a president, like Trump, who has just recently left office. But either way, they are simply wrong as a matter of the Constitutional text and meaning. The relevant text of the Constitution reads as follows: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” (Article II, Section 4)

Another provision of the Constitution says that an impeached president (or other office holder) may be disqualified “to hold and enjoy any office….” So some are arguing that the Constitutional provisions regarding impeachment should be interpreted to apply to any person who may be eligible to run in the future. Such an absurd interpretation of the Constriction would literally allow millions of ordinary citizens over the age of 35 to be impeached and disqualified from future office holding.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/10/crazy-2020-is-dead-long-live-crazier-2021/

The proper conservative response to last Wednesday’s violent entry into the Capitol and vandalism, as well as assaults on law-enforcement, is to identify the guilty parties and ensure they are arrested.

Such deterrence will prevent any future devolution from legal popular protests into thuggery. No constitutional republic can tolerate its iconic heart stormed, breached, and defiled.

Is Some Violence Worse than Others?

Of course, there is no such thing as “good” or “acceptable” violence of either Trump supporters or of the Antifa and BLM sort.

Yet the latter were largely exempt from any consequences for most of the summer—despite Joe Biden’s demagogic implication that the now multibillion-dollar funded BLM was treated harshly in comparison to the rogue Trump rioters.

Do we remember the authorities’ exemptions given to “warlord” Raz Simone and his armed thugs who, with absolute impunity, took over a Seattle “autonomous zone” known as CHOP or CHAZ, where four shootings and two deaths followed? Who exactly destroyed or vandalized thousands of state and federal public monuments—some in Washington, D.C.—and burned and looted hundreds of buildings with impunity?

Those who wrongly demanded to defund the police, now rightly deplore the lack of a Capitol police presence. Their only consistency is their own perceived political self-interest.

Biden himself rarely if ever, without exceptions, outright condemned the atrocious violence of Antifa and indeed contextualized it as an “idea”—a disincarnate entity that apparently could magically also burn and loot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/what-now-bruce-bawer/

I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined.

Worse, even, than Donald Trump, with all his insight, imagined.

He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.

Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.

The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people.” They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/driving-out-scapegoat-bruce-thornton/

After last Wednesday’s Trump rally at the Ellipse in D.C., some of the up to 100,000 present walked over to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to ratify the Electoral College vote. While there an even smaller number, a few hundred at the most, broke into the Capitol lobby, with some proceeding into a few Congressional offices.

So, a rally attended peacefully by the majority of people, was taken over by a small mob of knuckleheads and day-trippers who invaded the Capitol. Sadly, a woman and a police officer were killed, and three other protestors died from “medical emergencies.” Scores more including police officers were injured.

The police authorities in D.C. had bungled badly their security preparations, and bear a large share of the responsibility for this fiasco. But as always, the guilt lies with those who broke the law and should be punished. “The doer suffers,” as Aeschylus says.

But after five months of incessant rioting, vandalizing, and looting tolerated, ignored, rationalized, excused, encouraged, or even celebrated by the progressive Democrat leadership, media, commentators, mayors, and governors, this half-day-long violent episode is pretty far down on the list of civic mayhem––and the only one of hundreds of protests this year that was fomented by supporters of the President. Indeed, maybe security was light because Trump has conducted massive rallies for four years without any significant violence.

Reaction, however, to the Capitol riot has elicited even more-intense hysterical attacks on the President. Worse, now Republican and conservative lawmakers and commentators have indulged the bathetic rhetorical excesses that mechanically issue from Dems and NeverTrump Republicans skulking in digital hovels like The Lincoln Project and the Bulwark. They are demanding the President’s resignation, impeachment, or removal from office via the 25th Amendment, some preposterously professing anxiety that Trump will launch a Parthian nuclear strike as he leaves office.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/jaques-barzun-and-the-tragedy-of-race-thinking/

“This anxious wrangling which goes on about books and plays seems at times trivial but it is in fact fundamental. If democratic culture yields on this point no prospect lies ahead but that of increased animosity among pressure groups…”

The 1965 quote above is from Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), who made a very important contribution to the debate about racism and affirmative action. He issued a warning that went unheeded, and the explosive emergence of Black Lives Matter underlines the value of his advice.

Barzun grew up in a French household, where his parents conducted a modernist salon, and he completed high school in the US. He entered Columbia College in 1923, graduating four years later at the top of his class, then he taught at Columbia University and became a full professor in 1945, Dean of the Graduate Faculties in 1955, and the inaugural Dean of Faculties and Provost of the University in 1958. In his long career as a teacher, scholar and administrator he wrote, edited or translated some 40 books.

His first serious research was a dissertation on class and race in pre-revolutionary France, published some years later as Race, A Study in Modern Superstition (1937).  This was not written as a tract for the times because it grew out of research on cultural history that started long before Hitler became a significant figure. Barzun claimed the protracted dispute in France over the “race” of the nobility versus the bourgeoisie became one of the divisive factors that contributed to the French Revolution. Moreover “race-thinking” persisted after the Revolution as a component of the struggles between nations, political parties, religious faiths and social groups. For Barzun, “race-thinking” is one of the ways to justify collective hostility and it is most dangerous and powerful when it  operates in partnership with other motives such as the nationalism of the Nazis, the  socialism of the communists and, nowadays, the radicalism of Black Lives Matter.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/10/flashback-just-months-ago-democrats-blocked-a-resolution-condemning-mob-violence/

When a mob of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday, leaders from both political parties universally condemned the historic act of political violence.

“To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today- you did not win,” Vice-President Mike Pence stated to the chamber shortly after the rioters were expelled from the building by police using tear gas and percussion grenades. “Violence never wins.” He was joined by the Republican senators across the board, including those who had backed plans to object to the election’s certification.

After months ignoring and justifying Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots, Democrats also condemned the Capitol violence. “This assault is just that. It shows the weakness of those who’ve had to show through violence what their message was,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said.

Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., echoed the sentiment, arguing those who using political violence should face the harshest penalties available. “Those who performed these reprehensible acts cannot be called protesters – no, these were rioters and insurrectionists, goons and thugs, domestic terrorists… they must and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The cross-party condemnations came as a welcomed move. But that very the same Congress was anything but united on the issue of mob violence remarkably recently.

This July, those same congressional Democrats killed a resolution aimed at curbing mob violence. The bill, which was spearheaded by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, came about after an unarmed Utah man was murdered by a mob of left-wing activists. At least 30 people, ranging in age from 14-77, were killed in largely left-wing riots in summer 2020.