RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/todays-progressive-revolutionaries-more-dangerous-than-1960s-predecessors/

In the 1960s and early ’70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country’s attitudes on race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were likely the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.

Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.

The ’60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action and race/gender/ethnic college curricula.

The enemies of the ’60s counterculture were the “establishment” — politicians, corporations, the military and the “square” generation” in general. Leftists targeted their parents, who had grown up in the Great Depression. That generation had won World War II and returned to create a booming postwar economy. After growing up with economic and military hardship, they sought a return to comfortable conformity in the 1950s.

A half-century after the earlier revolution, today’s cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous.

Government and debt have grown. Social activism is already institutionalized in hundreds of newer federal programs. The “Great Society” inaugurated a multitrillion-dollar investment in the welfare state. Divorce rates soared. The nuclear family waned. Immigration, both legal and illegal, skyrocketed.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-22-soho-forum-presentation-why-libertarians-should-vote-for-trump-in-2020

I hope that many readers watched my online debate for the Soho Forum this evening. Below I am posting a somewhat abbreviated version of my opening statement, together with some of my closing remarks. Note that I made some very substantial deviations from this text in the actual oral presentation. I understand that the full debate — including the presentations of the other debaters — will be posted on the Soho Forum website within a few days.

From my opening statement:

Whom should a Libertarian vote for for President in 2020?  The answer is obvious:  Donald Trump.

The main reason is not quite as obvious.  We have a two party system.  Each of the two parties represents a broad coalition of groups and interests seeking to achieve sufficient votes and in the right places to win a majority of the electoral college in the election.  Because we have a two-party system, if you want to participate meaningfully in a presidential election, you must join one of the two broad coalitions that effectively compete for the presidency.  If you refuse to join one of those two broad coalitions, you are just voluntarily excluding yourself from any effective participation in the process.

The two broad coalitions are called the Republicans and the Democrats.  And thus I submit that your only real choices are Biden and Trump.  Between those two, the choice for a Libertarian of Trump over Biden is extremely compelling.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/508509-trump-v-big-city-mayors-when-the-feds-should-and-shouldnt-act

More than 38,000 cops protect and serve the city of New York. By contrast, in the entire country, the FBI employs just 14,000 agents. And comparatively few of those are assigned to combat violent street crime. 

These are facts the Trump administration must weigh as the president and the Justice Department design a federal response to the surge in crime that is plaguing major American cities.

Let’s draw important distinctions, from the federal standpoint, between what is possible, what is imperative, and what would be a prudent exercise of discretion.

First, what is legally possible. It is patently absurd to contend, as many have, that the federal government needs state government permission to conduct law enforcement operations within a state’s territory. The Constitution explicitly commands the president to see that federal law is faithfully executed. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies not only may but routinely do enforce federal law without even giving state authorities notice, much less asking for their approval.

But there is an important limitation: There must be a federal criminal law that justifies federal enforcement. 

In our federalist system, policing crime within a state’s jurisdiction — particularly violent crime and property crime — is primarily a state responsibility. The feds, by contrast, may prosecute only if Congress has enacted a law based on some responsibility the Constitution assigns to Washington.

That brings us to what it is imperative for the federal government to do.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/22/gottliebs-pfizer-announces-1-95-billion-deal-with-feds-for-covid-19-vaccine/

One would be hard-pressed to find a more influential figure in the ongoing coronavirus crisis than Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former chief of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In late March, Gottlieb, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, authored a lengthy report detailing how the country could get back to normal after the 15-day “Flatten the Curve/Stop the Spread” order. (Remember that?)

“A Road Map to Reopening” established the phased-in process most public officials are following as America struggles to recapture the daily life we abruptly abandoned more than four months ago. Much of the report fixated on the need to develop a widely-available vaccine to fight COVID-19; only then, according to Gottlieb, could the country return to some sense of “normal.”

The media, Democratic and Republican governors, and the White House have embraced Gottlieb’s report as the gold standard. Trump’s ex-FDA commissioner is a fixture on CNBC and the Sunday morning talk shows, where he often touts the need for a vaccine. “Life’s never going to be perfectly normal until we get to a vaccine,” he said March 22 on “Face the Nation.”

It looks like Gottlieb is getting his wish. On Wednesday morning, the federal government announced plans to purchase and distribute 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine; this is the first step in fulfilling the goal of “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership committed to delivering 300 million doses of a “safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.”

The initial order, paid for by the U.S. government but nonetheless advertised as “free” to Americans, will cost $1.95 billion.

In a joint statement, Pfizer and BioNTech, the two companies providing the vaccines, confirmed that two trial vaccines have received fast-track approval from the FDA; pending further testing, the companies will seek emergency regulatory approval “as early as October.” The companies plan to have 1.3 billion vaccines available by the end of 2021. Gottlieb should be thrilled.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/trump-announces-federal-surge-against-violent-crime-wave/

‘Operation Legend,’ named after a four-year-old shot to death in his sleep, relies on longstanding cooperation between federal, state, and local authorities.

President Trump announced this afternoon a “surge” in the federal effort to quell the violent crime that is spiking in major American cities.

The effort is along the lines of what Rich Lowry and I discussed on The McCarthy Report podcast last week, and in a column I wrote earlier this month about potential federal approaches to violent crime.

As we’ve noted, there was no need to re-create the wheel here. There is abundant law that gives federal agencies jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violent crime. Just as significantly, the federal government (the U.S. attorneys’ offices, the FBI, DEA, other federal agencies, and the U.S. courts) not only has a longstanding presence in our nation’s biggest cities. For decades, we’ve also had federal-state task forces, which are joint investigative efforts involving the police and prosecution agencies of the federal, state, and municipal governments to combat gang crime and its staples — street-level narcotics trafficking and gun crimes.

The president, with elaboration from Attorney General Bill Barr, explained that the new effort is called “Operation Legend,” in honor of LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was senselessly shot to death in his sleep last month when a still-unidentified gunman opened fire on his family’s apartment in Kansas City.

Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque. Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just yesterday — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who’d been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressives-to-cities-drop-dead-11595458490?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

On Tuesday the New York City sky was clear, blue and filled with sunshine. That’s it for this week’s good news. We turn now to Portland, Ore.; Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and all of America’s other seemingly Godforsaken cities.

President Trump watches a lot of television, so he’s seeing the same daily urban nightmares we’re seeing. It’s hard not to sympathize with his instinct to send in federal authorities to restore civil order to cities like Portland, as he proposed Wednesday with the expansion of an urban anticrime initiative called Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque.

It’s equally hard to disagree that, other than protecting federal facilities, Mr. Trump should let all of these smug Portlandia American cities stew in their own juices.

I loved it when Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said the federal presence “is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.” Where’s Groucho Marx when we need him to make sense of nonsense?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vaccine-progress-report-11595461075?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Life probably won’t return to normal until we have a widely distributed Covid-19 vaccine, and the good news is this may happen sooner than expected thanks to years of private investment and new cooperation between the U.S. government and drug companies.

On Wednesday the Trump Administration announced a $1.95 billion advance order for 100 million doses of a promising vaccine candidate by Pfizer and Germany-based BioNTech that could be available by the end of the year. Dare to dream. The drug makers plan to begin the final phase of their clinical trials this month and seek regulatory approval as soon as October.

***

The Administration’s Operation Warp Speed is accelerating vaccine development as well as the manufacturing of ingredients and equipment with the aim of delivering 300 million doses by January 2021. That’s an ambitious target, but the Administration is placing several bets with vaccine makers with the hope that at least one or two will pay off.

Evidence from early-stage clinical trials so far has been promising. Pfizer and BioNTech this month reported preliminary results from 45 volunteers showing that their mRNA vaccine candidate generated levels of neutralizing antibodies 1.8- to 2.8-times higher than those in recovered patients. The vaccine programs cells to produce a viral protein that stimulates an immune response.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/22/list-of-183-monuments-ruined-since-protests-began-and-counting/

Most monuments torn down were not by protesters, but by city officials after pressure or threats from protesters.

Thirty-three statues of Columbus. Nine of the Founding Fathers. Eight of Saint Junipero Serra. With the frequency of the ongoing iconoclasm, it can be hard to gain a scale of the problem.

For each story that has breached the news cycle, at least a dozen went unreported outside of local media. This detailed list records each instance monuments have been defaced, vandalized, and or torn down since nationwide protests began, updated as more occur.

Some key takeaways include:

At least 183 monuments, memorials, statues, and major historical markers have been defaced or pulled down since protests began in May.
While Confederate monuments have taken the lion’s share of media coverage, they actually form a minority of the statues targeted.
By far the most popular target was Christopher Columbus, with 33 statues in total having been defaced and pulled down.
The next most popular targets were Robert E. Lee (9), Serra (8), and Thomas Jefferson (4).
The vast majority of the vandals were never charged, with 177 out of 183 instances having no arrests.
Most monuments torn down were not by protesters, but by city officials after pressure or threats from protesters.
By far the most common route for monuments being destroyed was for protesters to damage it, then the city quickly removing it as a “public safety” hazard, not to be returned.
For a majority of the statues removed, the fate of the artwork is currently unknown, while a minority have been moved to cemeteries and museums.

The list begins with the most recent instance of iconoclasm and continues backwards in time until the first instance connected with nationwide rioting, in late May.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/alex-berenson-teachers-unions-reopening-schools-hate-trump

Teachers unions are largely in favor of postponing the reopening of schools, due to COVID-19

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson slammed teachers unions for being against reopening schools in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Across the country, teachers unions are largely in favor of postponing the reopening of schools, which have been closed since March as the pandemic was underway. In Wisconsin, the teachers unions of the state’s five biggest school districts are urging Democratic Gov. Tony Ivers to keep classes online at the beginning of the school year. In Florida, teachers unions even filed a lawsuit against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for pushing ahead in getting children in the classroom despite the rise in COVID cases.

Berenson has been an outspoken critic against what he calls “coronavirus alarmism.”

“I realize the teachers unions hate @realDonaldTrump far more than they care about kids, but they would be wise to consider the consequences of the game they’re playing here,” Berenson tweeted. “If parents believe the public schools can’t be trusted to run, they will find new options.”

President Trump and the White House have repeatedly urged schools across the nation to reopen in the fall, warning that the consequences for  children and parents may outweigh the risks of spreading the disease.

“The science should not stand in the way of this, but as Dr. Scott Atlas said — I thought this was a good quote, ‘Of course, we can do it. Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier here,'” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said last week, quoting the former Stanford Medical Center neurology chief.

However, other countries also brought their coronavirus outbreaks under control, unlike the United States. A major study out of South Korea found that children between the ages of 10 and 19 can actually spread coronavirus as well as adults do.