RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/u-s-consumer-confidence-posts-biggest-increase-since-late-2011

U.S. consumer confidence rose in June by more than forecast as optimism increased amid business reopenings, though sentiment remained well below pre-pandemic levels.

The Conference Board’s index jumped by 12.2 points to 98.1, the biggest one-month gain since late 2011, according to a report Tuesday. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists had called for a reading of 91.5.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/lopsided-joe-biden.html

Biden wants to convert the country, once a free one, into a nation of mask-wearing lepers. The Hollywood Reporter writes:

Soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would use his power to require Americans to wear face masks in public.

According to KDKA, Biden said:

“I would go back to making sure that everybody had masks, that you had PPE lined up, making sure we stockpile all the things that we need and we don’t have now. The one thing we do know, these masks make a gigantic difference. I would insist that everybody in public be wearing that mask. Anyone to reopen, it would have to make sure that they walked into a business that had masks.”

The difference is imaginary and specious, as I’ve written before.

Ken Rice of KDKA asked Biden if he could use his federal leverage to mandate it in which Biden responded “yes”.

Rice then pressed Biden if he would use it.

Here’s the exchange:

Rice: Would you?

Biden: Yes, I would from an executive standpoint, yes I would.

Victor David Hanson, on Ruth King, explains Biden’s state of mind better than I can:

“Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

“I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/elliebufkin/2020/06/30/four-men-charged-with-voter-fraud-in-new-jersey-n2571445

Democrats and their media surrogates have uniformly chosen to reject any notion that voting by mail could result in fraudulent results, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But against their narrative, four men in New Jersey were indicted last week for committing voter fraud related to mail-in ballots. 

Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced on Thursday that current Paterson City Council Vice President Michael Jackson along with Councilman-elect Alex Mendez were being charged along with two others in fraud related to the May 12 election. According to the charges, all four men are facing multiple counts of ballot tampering and incorrect ballot handling related to the election. 

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Paterson election for city council members faced the unique obstacle of being relegated only to vote-by-mail, something President Trump has lambasted throughout the national crisis. On election day, Jackson and Mendez, along with Shelim Khalique, brother of councilman Shahin Khalique, and Abu Razyen allegedly violated several election laws by collecting said mail-in ballots from voters’s homes and incorrectly delivering them to the Board of Elections. 

Jackson is further charged with possessing ballots that were not his nor was he assigned the bearer. One of those ballots was reportedly unsealed and unmarked by a voter but was later turned in to the Board of Elections sealed. Mendez is also charged with registering voters he knew to be ineligible to vote in the municipal election. 

The reported actions of these four men caused one in five ballots cast on the May 12 election to be removed as ineligible. More than 3,000 ballots were ruled by the Board of Election to be unqualified for counting. 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/1-week-after-mayor-promises-to-close-chaz-councilwoman-blames-chaz-shootings-on-capitalisms-brutality/

Socialist Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant blamed “capitalism” for yet another shooting in the city’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), also known as the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” (CHOP) Monday.

Sawant, a member of the left-wing group “Socialist Alternative,” which advocates for a $15 minimum wage and free college among a litany of other far-left fantasy items, said Monday’s shootings in the anarchist utopia that left a 16-year-old dead and a 14-year-old critically injured “highlights capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.”

“Our movement rejects insinuations & falsehoods perpetuated by corporate & conservative media that this violence is outcome of CHOP or of our movement,” Sawant wrote. Except that this is at least the area’s fourth shooting within two weeks, and the second to become fatal, according to Seattle’s King5 News.

Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.

America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while racism does not explain why cops kill more black than white people—poverty makes all people more likely to be killed by the cops, hundreds of poor whites are killed annually, but more black people are poor—they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college. 

These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/06/29/andy-ngo-eviscerates-nadlers-claim-that-antifas-role-in-riots-is-imaginary-n586315

On Monday, Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, testified before the House Oversight Committee, powerfully rebutting Rep. Jerry Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) insistence that when it comes to the protests and riots spreading across America after the horrific police killing of George Floyd, the presence of antifa instigators is “imaginary.” Ngo, who has suffered serious injury from antifa attacks, is a living rebuke to such claims.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that Ngo’s name did not appear on the Democrats’ web page for the hearing. “Mr. Ngo, why do Democrats try to ignore you?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know if it’s intentional,” Ngo responded. “I’ve written for very major publications about this very violent threat.” He noted that Portland has experienced “thirty-straight days of violent rioting downtown” following protests over the death of George Floyd.

Jordan asked Ngo to respond to the claim that antifa is “imaginary.”

“Yes, it’s real,” the journalist responded. “When I heard that, I was quite surprised.” He held up police affidavits in criminal cases against self-described members of antifa.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/29/will-governors-make-the-same-mistake-twice-with-lockdowns/

With a recent spike in coronavirus infections, no doubt due to the nationwide riots and demonstrations whipped up by the Democrats since late May, some governors are reversing their earlier easing of economic restrictions. It’s a huge and costly mistake.

At least 10 states and cities are either putting their reopenings on hold or actually imposing new lockdown rules.

Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington have hit the “pause” button, according to recent press reports. Meanwhile, the U.S.’ three most populous states, California, Florida and Texas, have reversed their reopenings, in essence reimposing a lockdown.

Supposedly it’s a response to 27 states reporting big rises in new coronavirus cases.

But those spikes have two main causes: One, more testing finds more infections. So cases are naturally “spiking”. Two, recent demonstrations, riots and other non-socially distanced activities led to an increase — with nary a peep from the Democratic “progressive” left, which cynically hopes to ride the wave of coronavirus cases into the White House and a congressional majority.

In fact, the data are clear. The lockdowns had no real impact on the virus’ spread. But they did have a devastating impact on the economies where they were introduced.

“Residents and business owners in states under a COVID shutdown mandate from their governors are suffering far more job loss,” according to data crunched by the Kansas Policy Institute. “May private-sector employment in those 43 states was 13.1% lower than a year ago, but the states not shut down by their governors only lost 7.7% of their private job base.”

So, if politicians do their citizens the non-favor of re-closing parts of their economies in the mistaken belief that doing so will halt the spread of coronavirus, they will be making a major error, one that will cost us dearly as a nation.

“Even if lockdowns were the best strategy, the authorities, espousing and imposing them repeatedly, undermined their legitimacy,” wrote former U.S. Treasury official (and Issues & Insights contributor) J.T. Young on The Hill web site. “Authorities have so discredited the lockdowns that there is little chance lockdowns can be reimposed at their prior level — even if they are needed.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/reparations-fallacy-joseph-klein/

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives last week that “Black Lives Matter is a mandate from the people. It’s time. Pay us what you owe us.” Pressley is a demagogue. We are not living in a mob-run democracy of the “people.” We live in a constitutional republic. Americans don’t owe Pressley (speaking for “us”) anything except her salary – even that’s a stretch given her performance.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of the New York Times’ historically flawed 1619 Project on black slavery as the central theme of America’s identity, at least tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to present persuasive arguments and selective bits of history in support of her call for reparations. She wrote an extensive cover story for the June 28th edition of The New York Times Magazine, entitled “What is Owed.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones demands recompense in the form of an unspecified amount of reparations for the “centuries of meticulously orchestrated inequities” that she says still persist. She claims that these inequities give white Americans a “centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today.” Hannah-Jones further argues that “the lack of wealth has been a defining feature of black life since the end of slavery,” which has been caused by “400 years of racialized plundering.” She plays down the significance of legal progress on civil rights during the last 70 years, beginning with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and including legislation prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and voting rights.