RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/demoralizing-the-police-crime-soars

The police officer occupies a distinctive position in American life. Dressed in his uniform and driving his distinctively marked cruiser, he is the most visible symbol of civil government and serves as a reminder that society is governed by rules that citizens are expected to follow. A compact exists between the officer and the government that he serves. The officer does his job in the knowledge that it comes with significant risk to his personal safety; he accepts this risk with the understanding that the government affords him certain protections, especially in cases where he may have to use reasonable or justifiable force.

Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers—and with the resulting social upheaval—that compact has been now tossed aside. Today, the police officer is an object of derision and scorn, viewed not as a remedy to crime and disorder but as a cause of it—at least to an uninformed but influential minority, which includes members of the government and media. As the police officer endures this reaction, he knows crime and disorder haven’t abated. Indeed, both have increased alarmingly in many places. But now, if the officer uses force to bring a lawbreaker into custody, the legal protections that he once enjoyed will be abrogated, if necessary, to appease that same minority.

How else to explain the speed with which Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe was fired and charged with murder after he shot and killed Rayshard Brooks on June 12? How else to explain why Rolfe’s partner, Devin Brosnan, has been charged with aggravated assault and violation of his oath? After the tumult in Minneapolis and elsewhere, Atlanta’s authorities clearly sacrificed both officers in the hope that their city wouldn’t be looted and burned. There isn’t a cop in America who hasn’t feared being in Rolfe’s place.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/11/its-all-about-november-3/

The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory.  Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” That lapidary observation from the Sermons (1726) of Joseph, Bishop Butler, is one of the most profound philosophical observations I have ever encountered. One of the simplest, too. In nine short words, it introduces a principle of mental hygiene that Marxists, Freudians, Hegelians, astrologers, sociobiologists, and other lovers of mystification ignore at their—or, more to the point, at our—peril.

Butler’s chief target was what we now call the selfish theory of human nature—the “strange affection in many people of explaining away all particular affections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continued exercise in self-love.” Butler zeros in on the fundamental confusion that nurtures this unflattering view of humanity. It is this: a (deliberate?) confusion between the proposition that we cannot knowingly act except from a desire or interest which is our own, and the proposition that all of our actions are self-interested. 

The first is not only true, it is a necessary truth: it could not be otherwise. The second proposition— that all of our actions are self-interested—far from being self-evidently true, is a scandalous falsehood.  

It is a tautology that any interest we have is an interest of our own: whose else could it be? But the objects of our interest are as varied as the world is wide. 

No doubt much of what we do we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune. 

“It is not,” Butler notes, “because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them.” How much wandering in mental thickets might have been avoided had Sigmund Freud acquainted himself with Butler’s Sermons?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/descending_into_chaos.html

““That breakdown is upon us…Unless new leaders come forth who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster.”

The medieval Christian conception of the great chain of being, so ably described and analyzed by Arthur Lovejoy and E. M. Tillyard, has been one of the most resonant concepts addressing mankind’s unique position in the cosmos. Situated between the divine and the earthy, the angelic and the bestial, the spiritual world and the physical creation, the human being is understood as a hybrid being consisting of a “higher” nature and a “lower” nature in perpetual conflict with one another. It is a metaphor that makes good explanatory sense.

Thus, we are tugged in two antithetical directions, toward reason, order and imagination on the one hand and envy, resentment and malice on the other, toward the tablets on the mountain above and the calf in the wilderness below. The gravity of degradation, alas, is always stronger than the upward flight of intellectual clarity and moral commitment. This will never change, but the choice and struggle between the angel and the animal within us, between logic and appetite, is what constitutes the essence of human identity, and the intermittent victory of the former over the latter is what constitutes the essence of human potentiality — that is, of the truly human.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/trump-spares-stone-from-imprisonment-sparking-howls-from-amnesiac-democrats/

“The Stone episode has been farcical from the start, and it’s still not over.”

One-time defenders of unsavory Clinton and Obama pardons are outraged by the president’s commutation of his old associate’s 40-month sentence.

Bill Clinton pardoned his own brother for felony distribution of cocaine. And a key witness in the Whitewater scandal for which he and Hillary Clinton were under investigation. And three others convicted in independent counsel Ken Starr’s probe. And Marc Rich, in what was a straight up political payoff. And his CIA director. And his HUD secretary. And eight people convicted in an investigation of his Agriculture Department.

No surprise there: The Clintons and their supporters then, like Trump and his supporters now, regarded the special-prosecutor probes into the administration as witch hunts.

Clinton also commuted the sentences of convicted terrorists, some of whom hadn’t even asked for clemency. Shameless as he was, though, even he couldn’t bring himself to pardon Oscar Lopez Rivera, the defiantly unrepentant FALN leader.

President Obama took care of that.

Obama also commuted the sentence of a U.S. soldier who passed top-secret information to WikiLeaks. He pardoned his former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, who’d been convicted of making false statements about a leak of classified information to the New York Times. And when he couldn’t get Congress to amend federal drug laws the way he wanted them amended, Obama used the pardon power to slash hundreds of sentences, under an executive initiative later sharply criticized by the Obama-appointed DOJ inspector general.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/justice_for_roger_stone_.html

President Trump has corrected a miscarriage of justice. His commutation of the sentence, rather than a pardon, allows Stone to seek redress via the courts

On Friday, July 10th, President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence.  The clemency order, not to be confused with a pardon, allows Stone to fight in the appeals court to clear his name against what many consider a legal railroading. Friends of Stone claim that Trump had offered a pardon only to be rebuffed by Stone who asked for clemency to remain out of jail as he fights through the appeals court.

The decision to grant clemency came after a series of revelations which proved that Mueller’s team of prosecutors had tampered with evidence, manufactured statements, and buried exonerating evidence in their case against General Flynn, prompting the Justice Department to drop the case out of embarrassment. Mueller’s prosecutorial misconduct in the Flynn case strongly mirrors the prosecution of Roger Stone. Despite no underlying crime or Russian collusion found, the prosecution chose to push forward with process crimes.

Stone was accused of threatening a witness after sending text messages to comedian Randy Credico, telling him “my lawyers are dying to rip you to shreds…prepare to die”. Stone felt Credico had spun a false narrative to Mueller’s investigators to throw him under the bus. Even Credico claims the texts were taken out of context and were not threats of violence or intimidation.

Stone was also charged with lying to Congress. When Stone was asked by Congress if he was speaking with Wikileaks, Stone replied that he did not have a contact in the organization, but was speaking with Credico, who had interviewed Julian Assange. This turned out to be a factual statement, but prosecutors alleged that Stone claimed his contact was Credico in order to protect Jerome Corsi. In hindsight, the claim that Stone was lying to protect Corsi from prosecution rings hollow, as Corsi was never found to have committed any crimes and was never charged.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supremes-signal-a-brave-new-world-of-popular-presidential-elections/

The Court’s decision in Chiafalo v. Washington seems sure to intensify the partisan fight over the Electoral College’s future.

Whither the Electoral College?

The Supreme Court had its say on the matter during the always-eventful last week of the term. To repeat a contention often made in these columns, the High Court has evolved into an essentially political institution, robed in the judiciary’s apolitical veneer. Given that we are a deeply divided nation, that the late-term cases are usually the most controversial, and that the four left-leaning justices — those appointed by Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama — tend to vote as a bloc in these cliffhanger rulings, one doesn’t expect many 9–0 decisions when the calendar reaches late June (let alone July).

Yet there it was on Monday: Chiafalo v. Washington. At issue was the question of “faithless electors.” Specifically, may a state enforce the pledge it compels electors to make to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the state’s popular vote? The Court’s holding that states have the power to do so was unanimous. Significantly, though, the Court was not of one mind about why.

The case is worth our attention because of what’s been going on under the radar.

Among the Left’s many transformative projects is the drive to have presidents elected by a national popular vote. The project, known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would effectively eliminate the Constitution’s Electoral College system. It would reduce the College to a nullity by requiring a state’s electors to vote for the candidate who wins the national popular vote — regardless of whether that candidate loses the state’s popular vote. As Hillary Clinton and Al Gore could tell you, that would radically change how presidents are elected, and ultimately how we are governed.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/alex-berenson-schools-should-reopen-no-restrictions

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer on the “Hemmer Time” podcast that his preferred response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic “is not that different than what people who are experts on infectious disease were saying we should do about flu pandemics.

“That means,” added Berenson, “you don’t shut down the schools. You know, maybe you temporarily shut them down if there’s a large rash of cases for a week or two. But you don’t shut down the schools. You don’t shut down society. You don’t force people to wear masks in public unless there’s really good evidence that doing so is going to reduce transmission, which we don’t have.”

Berenson, the author of “Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns,” has drawn a large social media following — and become a divisive figure — for his skepticism about the effectiveness of lockdowns and mask-wearing in stopping the spread of the virus.

He told Hemmer that a case to “temporarily shut down the country … for a week or 10 days or two weeks” could have been made around mid-March, as confirmed cases began to multiply in early hotspots like New York City.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/10/fauci-is-a-deep-state-fraud/

I knew for sure that Anthony Fauci is a fraud after listening to him for about 10 seconds—as anyone who listens carefully would have known as well. President Trump had been charging the Chinese government with obscurancy and deception in its handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Fauci had dealt intimately with the Chinese on that matter. His National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control had partially financed the notorious Wuhan laboratory where Chinese scientists were researching the virus. Fauci knew a lot.

A reporter asked Fauci if he agreed with Trump that the Chinese have not been fully forthcoming about the scope of the pandemic. Fauci answered that although the Chinese had lacked candor in previous years, this time they had turned over “the sequence of the virus.” Spoken like a wily swamp reptile!

His words were factually correct. The Chinese had turned over all they knew about the virus’s “sequence”—namely, its genetic structure. But the reporter and the audience neither knew nor cared about that. They were interested in the Chinese government’s misrepresentations of the virus’s contagion, fatality rate, and so forth. That is what they had dissembled and lied about. 

Fauci’s answer artfully deceived the audience into believing the opposite of the truth. Thus did Fauci help plant a dagger between Trump’s shoulder blades and help his party—the Democrats and the deep state—extort the American people’s compliance to their agendas.