RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/looting-american-culture/

The young people destroying shops, stealing goods, shooting and beating have been shaped by a culture that bows to suffering and elevates victimhood.

 If George Floyd, the African-American strangled to death by the knee of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, had been white, his death would have elicited the same horrified reaction on my part.

A violent killing by a member of the police department is unfathomable and inexcusable.  But so is the behavior of the angry “Black Lives Matter” mob.  Martin Luther King Jr. surely would have agreed. He would have considered the current violence and looting to devalue the cause and decay the role of blacks.

King outlined his dream—as the best-selling author Douglas Murray recalled in his 2019 book, The Madness of the Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity—at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

Describing how black Americans first were slaves and then second-class citizens, he denounced the laws of racial segregation (that still existed in certain state at the time), and said that he dreamed his children should “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/05/leftism-not-racism-destroys-black-upward-mobility/

The rioting and looting across the United States have been widely—though not universally—condemned. The “peaceful protests,” on the other hand, have been universally praised. But is this appropriate? Wouldn’t a broader and more balanced discussion be more constructive than praise without reservation?

Obviously, people have the right to peacefully protest injustice, and obviously incidents of murderous police brutality are more than sufficient justification for protests. But that’s as far as it goes. The scope of these protests is disproportionate to the offense, not because the offense wasn’t hideously wrong, but because there are far more dangerous challenges facing black Americans. The biggest challenge of all: leftists who indoctrinate blacks to think they are always first and foremost victims of racism.

Debunking this narrative of racism can start with the allegation that a disproportionate number of blacks are victims of police brutality, which in itself (and regardless of race) is extremely rare.

To put this into context, there are more than 800,000 sworn police officers in America, authorized to make arrests and use deadly force. Over 50 million Americans have at least one encounter with a police officer per year, usually involving something minor such as a traffic stop. Police make over 10 million arrests each year. On average, just over 1,000 Americans each year are killed by police, but nearly all of them were armed. In confrontations with unarmed people over the past decade, only between 50 and 100 have been shot per year by police, about the same number as police who are killed in hostile encounters per year.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/05/nobel-scientist-says-lockdown-saved-no-lives-and-may-have-cost-lives-n499574

Prof Michael Levitt, a British-American-Israeli who shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013, believes the flawed models by Nile Ferguson of Imperial College, upon which most nations and states based their lockdown strategies, led to a global “panic virus” that spread to political leaders and cost many more deaths from “social damage,” including domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism. “And then you have those who were not treated for other conditions,” says Levitt.

Health analyst Richard Baehr says, “A growing share of the excess deaths are not from COVID diagnosed patients but from heart conditions, drug overdoses, suicides. We could call these lockdown deaths.”

“Excess deaths” has been all the rage with lockdown advocates who constantly point to that number as proof that the lockdown was necessary. Whether it was or not, history will decide. But what’s certain is that those who dared mention that the lockdown itself was going to take lives and were pilloried by the media — Donald Trump in particular — were spot on right.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/05/did-this-black-life-matter-not-to-the-mob/

“According to the Centers for Disease Control, the leading cause of death for black males from the ages of 1 to 44 is homicide. Given that there were roughly 1,000 deaths last year caused by law enforcement officers — not all of the dead were black men, not all of the killings unjustified — we know that many of the deaths among black males were in no way associated with law enforcement. For the record, all those whose lives were ended too soon by homicides in which officers weren’t involved matter. They’re not just statistics.”

Early Tuesday morning, a black man was brutally killed by an act permitted by those in authority and with influence. Where are the protests over his death?

That black man was David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired St. Louis police captain. He was killed by looters during the George Floyd riots, shot to death “exercising law enforcement training that he learned,” says St. Louis Police Chief John Hayden.

Dorn was gunned down after responding to an alarm at a pawn shop that was being looted. The authorities who allowed his death are those elected officials who loosed the rioters by endorsing their rampages and refusing to prosecute them for the crimes, and the media that have approved of the criminal acts, lending them legitimacy.

George Floyd lost his life when a man in and under authority went too far, while other men in and under authority did nothing. It was an ugly act that demands justice. But so does Dorn’s death. Where, then, are the protests on his behalf? Didn’t Dorn’s life matter as much as Floyd’s? Are national politicians going to attend his funeral, as they surely will the Minnesota man’s service? Or was Dorn’s life worth less because of the differences in the way each died?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/politicians-shutter-churches-and-synagogues-then-tolerate-riots-11591376851?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Ms. Shrier is author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” out June 30.

‘Are we in a pandemic or not?” a reporter from the Orthodox Jewish newspaper Hamodia asked New York Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday. “And do we have one set of rules for protesters and another for everyone else?”

Good questions. For nearly three months, the country founded to guarantee religious freedom has seen its houses of worship shut down. Following local and state executive orders, Catholic churches held no Mass. Communion wasn’t taken, confessions weren’t heard, and Catholics went to their final rest without the comfort of the sacraments. Jewish prayer services, which require a quorum, were broken up by city governments or banned by state executive orders. New York City police were dispatched to break up a Jewish funeral and close down a yeshiva where Jews teach their children Torah.

“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple,” Mr. de Blasio thundered in an infamous tweet, after having dispatched police to break up a funeral: “The time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-economy-rises-from-the-dead-11591400329?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Friday’s surprisingly upbeat jobs report for May was no doubt cheered by most Americans, but not by all. Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer seemed glum, as they ignored the progress and demanded still more federal money. What do they have against good economic news?

The resilient American economy surprised nearly everyone by creating 2.5 million new jobs in the month, while the jobless rate fell to 13.3% from 14.7% in April. The number of unemployed fell 2.1 million to a still awful 21 million, but many good economists had predicted a jobless rate of more than 20%. The numbers look even better given that the jobs survey was taken mid-month, which was before the economic lockdowns eased in much of the country.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/05/how-lefts-normalization-collective-guilt-ripping-america-apart/

“Americans want to stand with those peacefully protesting injustice. But the radical Left offers either the choice of self-condemnation for evils Americans had no hand in, or to be silent and stay that way. If the second option is chosen, that very silence is viewed as an indictment of “complicity” often seen by the Left as akin to violence itself. Ultimately, that’s no choice at all.”

All decent Americans stand against racism. But if we’re to live as brothers, we must stop indicting all those who share a skin tone for the sins of others.

I was nowhere near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street when George Floyd tragically lost his life. I wasn’t in Minnesota. I was more than 500 miles away. With the exception of the officers at that heartbreaking scene, there are more than 329 million additional Americans who had no part in that terrible evening.

So why are so many people acting as if it were their knee, not Derek Chauvin’s, that pressed down on George Floyd? The answer lies in the concerted effort of radical leftists and their unwitting accomplices to normalize the collectivization of guilt.

The Great Guilting

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/trump-derangement-syndrome-at-the-lancet/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-trump-derangement-syndrome-at-the-lancet&itm_

A retracted study about hydroxychloroquine’s dangers is another sign of the publication’s political bias poisoning its medical reports.

Remember when we were told that the administration of Donald J. Trump posed a pernicious threat to science and medicine? In an attempt to sharpshoot Trump’s most famous scientific claim, one of the world’s leading medical journals just blew off its own foot.

What other possible explanation can there be for the catastrophic failure of The Lancet’s thunderously hyped anti-hydroxychloroquine article, which this week was retracted after it was revealed to be unsubstantiated, if not a full-on hoax?

On May 22, the hugely influential medical journal published an article on the most talked-about drug of the coronavirus pandemic. In the midst of a public-health crisis, when one particular treatment is receiving inordinate attention, it is critically important for The Lancet and other medical journals to guide us with facts rather than add to the political noise. Lives were, and are, on the line.

Doctors who had some anecdotal evidence, but no clinical proof, that hydroxychloroquine might be part of an effective treatment for COVID-19 sufferers were desperate to learn whether the drug works, doesn’t work, or is downright harmful to such patients. The Lancet in effect constructed a flashing red neon stop sign warning the medical profession that the drug was worse than useless. This matters.

The New York Times and virtually every other media outlet took the study at face value; the Times ran the alarming headline, “Malaria Drug Taken by Trump Is Tied to Increased Risk of Heart Problems and Death in New Study.” The Washington Post ran this headline: “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.” The World Health Organization and several other health organizations halted clinical trials of HCQ and several national governments altered policy for the same reason.