RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/27/why-john-durham-should-release-his-spygate-findings-before-november/

The fact that John Durham’s findings could play a role in how some Americans think about a particular person or party should not dissuade Durham from releasing them before the election.

There is growing speculation that U.S. Attorney John Durham, the lead prosecutor looking into the origins of the Russia probe and the spying on the Trump campaign, is close to wrapping up his investigation. Once he does, it is unclear whether he will release a report of his findings or issue indictments against one or more individuals if the evidence so warrants.

As reported by the Washington Examiner, several sources have indicated that “Durham may end up waiting until after November to reveal what he has found or to hand down indictments” because Durham does not want his investigation or any decisions to be viewed as “political.” This would be a mistake. There is no question that he should release his findings and issue any necessary indictments before the November elections.

Historically, the Department of Justice has refrained from taking any action for partisan purposes. As reported in Just Security:

Department of Justice employees are entrusted with the authority to enforce the laws of the United States and with the responsibility to do so in a neutral and impartial manner. This is particularly important in an election year.

The Memorandum further states (emphasis added):

As Department employees … we must be particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=FtO3sT_0o84&feature=emb_logo

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/26/where-are-the-new-heroes-of-the-revolution/

Cultural revolutions are suicidal, nihilistic, and incoherent. Those who survive such cannibalism do so by arbitrarily exempting their leaders from their own rules of mandated purity and no statute of limitations.

Since late May, the United States has been convulsed by a cultural revolution unlike any seen in its recent history. Statues have been toppled, often without any logic or consistent grievance. Institutions have been renamed, again without coherent consistency.

Christian iconography has been a common target. Television shows have been taken off the air; particular corporations boycotted; professional sports recalibrated into social activist spectacles. 

If there is any common denominator to this madness, it is apparently that the past was toxic, and erasing it in the present will make for a more just and united future.

For example, because of the glorification of the imperialist and spoiler of native paradise Christopher Columbus, his statue in Chicago must be removed nocturnally by the order of the mayor—in order to restore peace of mind, social justice, and calm. That act of iconoclasm will rectify things in the present, and thus there will not be another 500 annual homicides in Chicago.

But once names are replaced and commemoration destroyed, what exactly follows the erased?

Anarchy Is the Replacement

Mao and Stalin had their pictures put up everywhere—while making the prior czars and the warlords amateurs in the arithmetic of genocide. The revolutionary Castro Brothers and Muammar Gaddafi turned the streets of Havana and Tripoli into Disney-like ads for their persons. So did Saddam Hussein—as thousands were rounded up and murdered.

Will the founders of Black Lives Matter demand such statues for themselves?

In truth, the iconoclasts and revolutionaries are guided by an informal set of chaotic rules that ensures their movement must remain anarchical and nihilist. They cannot really replace what they have destroyed—at least according to their own ad hoc rules of political correctness. And after over two months of constant protests, we know what those protocols are. 

One, we do not judge famous people by weighing their bad and good deeds. One sin—with or without confession—condemns you to politically incorrect Hell. One bad characteristic—especially supposed racism—cancels whatever good one otherwise accomplished.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/26/sandmann-lawyer-agrees-to-represent-carter-page/

Four long years after the FBI and the press tried to ruin him, the former Trump campaign associate might finally get the exoneration—and payday—he deserves.

On Friday, Lin Wood, the attorney representing a Kentucky teenager in a number of defamation lawsuits against major media outlets, announced a settlement with the Washington Post. The terms of the agreement between the family of Nicholas Sandmann—the Covington Catholic High School student accused of disrespecting a “native elder” while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat during the January 2019 March for Life—remain secret. 

Wood and Sandmann settled a similar lawsuit against CNN earlier this year. Cases still are pending against NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Gannett.

On Sunday, Wood confirmed he will represent another innocent person maligned and defamed by the American news media: Carter Page, the Trump campaign associate who James Comey’s FBI accused of acting as an agent of Russia. 

Page was the target of four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. The most powerful, invasive government tools—usually reserved for suspected foreign terrorists—were unleashed against Page as a way to infiltrate and spy on Team Trump.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/07/26/watch-former-bears-coach-mike-ditka-blasts-nfl-players-that-refuse-to-stand-for-n2573145

““If you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country. That’s the way I feel. Of course, I’m old fashioned. So, I’m only going to say what I feel. I think there’s a way you protest and there’s a way you don’t protest,” he explained. “You don’t protest against the flag. You don’t protest against this country that’s given you the opportunity to make a living playing a sport you never thought would happen.”

During an interview with TMZ, Former Chicago Bears Coach Mike Ditka shredded National Football League players that decide to kneel during the national them. According to Ditka, it’s disrespectful to “protest” against the flag and the country that has provided opportunities to professional athletes.

“The whole kneeling thing in the NFL, you’ve got guys saying they’re gonna do it. You know, baseball players, different teams, last night I watched baseball, you got the Red Sox and the As and the Giants, a lot of teams are kneeling, athletes are kneeling. In your league here, you’re the chairman of this league, is that going to be allowed if the women want to take a knee during the anthem?” TMZ asked. “What’s the policy on that from you guys?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/critical-race-comes-folger-shakespeare-library-daniel-greenfield/

In 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on Shakespeare’s birthday with President Herbert Hoover and Robert Frost in attendance. The Library would house the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios, and and hundreds of thousands of volumes gathered across the centuries.

“In almost unbelievable fullness and richness, we assembled books, pamphlets, documents, manuscripts, relics, curios,” John Quincy Adams Jr, its first director, wrote. “The library is thus more than a mere library; it is also a museum of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, and a memorial to the influence that Shakespeare has exerted upon the world’s culture.”

These days, the Folger Shakespeare Library has a new mission. And it isn’t Shakespeare.

After George Floyd died during a confrontation with police, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library declared that, “the fight against racial injustice is essential to what we do as an institution.”

What does Floyd have to do with Shakespeare and what does racism have to do with the Folger Library?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/fake_actor_attends_fake_protest.html

A year and a half ago, fading actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by two masked white men who shouted anti-homosexual and anti-black slurs at him, while dousing him in bleach in the late hours of a freezing night in Chicago. 

The city of Chicago later charged him with paying two Nigerian brothers, black by the way, who lived in the city to stage the attack.  The charges against Smollett were later dropped but the city is now suing him to recoup its costs in the case which is continuing.

That was then.  This is so now.  Saturday, on a warm summer day in New York, Smollett joined a group shrieking …yep!…”black lives matter” outside…yep! Trump Tower.

Smollett wore a blue T-shirt and jean shorts for the protest and was recognized by his distinctive equal sign tattoo on his right arm. It’s not clear what group he was protesting with. 

And you thought 2020 couldn’t get more bizarre!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/violence-erupts-around-protests-across-u-s-11595784837?mod=hp_lead_pos6

Large demonstrations turned violent around the country over the weekend as tens of thousands of Americans continued a monthslong wave of civil unrest protesting racism and police tactics.

Seattle protesters hurled rocks and explosives at police officers during violent confrontations near the police department’s East Precinct station on Saturday. Dozens of people were arrested and 59 officers were injured, including many with burns and abrasions, according to police. The explosives also caused structural damage to the station, the officials said.

In Portland, Ore., where protesters have been marching for more than 50 days, thousands of demonstrators—some wearing gas masks and carrying shields, leaf blowers and hockey sticks—gathered outside the U.S. Courthouse, police officials said. Some in the crowd threw rocks and fireworks before breaking through a section of reinforced fence surrounding the building.

In Austin, Texas, a protester was fatally shot during a Black Lives Matter gathering near the state capitol.

Protests have taken place across the U.S. after the May 25 death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis. But many marches grew in size and intensity over the weekend, and focused on what demonstrators say is overreach by local and federal officers in Portland and other cities. At some events, protesters carried guns.

Police officials in Portland and Seattle declared some demonstrations in their cities “riots” and used pepper spray and other crowd-control tools to disperse gatherings. Both police departments were bracing for more confrontations with protesters on Sunday.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-25-the-left-turns-into-a-craze

If you have been paying any attention whatsoever, you have to have noticed the recent rapid transformation of the progressive left movement into a crazed Maoist cult. Yes, the phenomenon of “political correctness” — meaning a leftist orthodoxy enforced among willing participants who think themselves sophisticated — has been around for a long time. We even used that term back when I was in college 50 years ago.

But recent events take the phenomenon to a whole new level. Back in the 70s my friends and I could stand aside from the politically correct crowd and laugh at them as second raters lacking the ability for independent thought. Now if you are in the wrong place there is no more standing aside and no more laughing. Whole swaths of major institutions, most notably essentially all of academia and the media, plus many large corporate entities, no longer brook any dissent from progressive orthodoxy. One slip and the wrath of the mob gets called down upon you.

Consider Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School. You would think that there could hardly be a better example of left-center Democratic normalism than this guy. But he does have a tendency to stray from the party line from time to time. It probably started close to twenty years ago, when he came out in favor of due process for males accused of sex-related misconduct. More recently he committed the unpardonable sin of participating the the defense of President Trump in his impeachment trial.