RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/these_black_lives_dont_matter_as_far_as_the_national_media_are_concerned.html

The death of George Floyd has convulsed the nation for a week now, the literal flames fanned by the national media.  But a far larger — and ongoing — death toll of (mostly) young black men in Chicago slain by gang warfare gets almost no attention — perhaps because the many killers in question are mostly other young black men of the criminal gang persuasion.

As rioters looted, burned, assaulted, and killed nationwide, Chicago saw one of its worst weekend death tolls ever.

The Chicago Sun-Times tallies “82 shot, 22 fatally, over Chicago’s most violent weekend of 2020.”  By that newspaper’s count, 17 of the 22 killed were felled on Sunday, following a Saturday night marked by riots and destruction.  The Cook County medical examiner counted only 15 gun homicides countrywide, but the office did note that the medical examiner conducted 35 autopsies that day, 15 to 20 more than normal:

“This is an unprecedented amount of homicides in one day for our office,” said Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar. “The most I can recall in one day since I started here in 2003 is 10.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/minnesota-madness-lloyd-billingsley/

Within days of causing the death of African American George Floyd by holding a knee to his neck, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. If convicted, Chauvin faces 12 years in prison, the same sentence drawn by another deadly Minneapolis cop.

In 2017,  Mohamed Noor, a Somali-born Muslim (pictured above) and his partner Matthew Harrity, responded to a 911 call from Australian woman Justine Damond. The officers’ body cams were turned off so there was no video of Mohamed Noor gunning down Damond as she approached the police car.

According to the medical examiner, Noor’s bullet struck an abdominal artery and the 40-year-old woman, who was to be married within a month, lost so much blood that prompt medical attention might not have saved her. Police officer Mohamed Noor refused to speak with state investigators.

As prosecutors noted, no forensic evidence proved that Damond even touched the squad car, as the shooter Mohamed Noor claimed. The officer, 33, had been a prize police recruit, celebrated as an example of diversity. After charges were filed, Noor lost his job but the local police association supported him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-sole-justification-offered-for-the-riots-is-a-fiction/

Rioters and their enablers claim that the present disorder is justified by an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men. But no such epidemic exists.

There is a lot we don’t yet know about the interaction between Derek Chauvin and George Floyd — National Review’s Andy McCarthy has done yeoman’s work in sifting through the police report and highlighting some of the remaining uncertainties. We do have that video, though. And what that video depicts — the way that Floyd writhes in pain and gasps for his late mother with his final breaths — is enough to stir even the most callous viewer to outrage.

And stir it has — the anger has been nearly universal. The president, in his way, decried the killing. Conservative and liberal commentators alike have, in their way, condemned the officer’s actions. The system, in its way, is responding, too. All of the officers involved were fired. Derek Chauvin is sitting in a maximum-security prison awaiting trial on murder and manslaughter charges. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison is “moving as expeditiously, quickly, and effectively” as possible to arraign the other officers involved, as the facts allow. Chauvin will get his day in court. Floyd’s family will, too.

No one of prominence thinks that Chauvin should not face justice. No one of prominence has excused his behavior, or defended the indifference of his partners. No one of prominence feels anything but awful sympathy for George Floyd and his family. Most everyone agrees on these points, and most everyone is outraged.

It is in the context of this universal outrage that we are asked to consider the behavior of the looters and rioters, the vigilantes and anarchists, the masked delinquents defacing property, ransacking stores, and burning police cars in an orgy of disorder and destruction.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/500349-science-says-open-the-schools

To stop COVID-19 dead in its tracks, many governors, mayors and superintendents are threatening to keep schools closed this fall, failing to consider the greater harm that comes from refusing to open them.

“We have to make sure kids are safe, family members are safe, educators are safe, staff is safe,” says New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “If for any reason we are not confident of that, then you can just stick with the pure online learning.” Similarly, teacher unions insist that comprehensive testing, tracing and distancing are essential if reopening is to be done safely.

The irony in such language is that children are safe at school already. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that of the first 68,998 U.S. deaths from COVID-19, only 12 have been in children under age 14 — less than 0.02 percent. Nor is coronavirus killing teenagers. At last count, the fatality total among children under 18 without an underlying condition is one; only ten of the 16,469 confirmed coronavirus deaths in New York City were among those under the age of 18. That’s similar to the fatality rate for those under 20 in France, estimated at 0.001 percent, and in Spain.

The death of even one child is tragic, of course. Yet, it must be kept in mind that as many as 600 children in the United States died from seasonal influenza in 2017-18, according to CDC estimates, while the CDC’s estimate for COVID-19 fatalities number just 12. A just-released JAMA Pediatrics study flatly states: “Our data indicate that children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19.” If the COVID-19 hazard sets the new standard for health safety, the country will need to close its schools each year from November until April to guard against influenza.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/02/time_for_the_fbi_to_disclose_discharge_and_disinfect___143342.html

When Christopher Wray was named director of the FBI in August 2017, he had two crucial tasks: clean the Augean Stables, which had been fouled by James Comey, and restore public confidence in the bureau. Comey presided over a carnival of misconduct. Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, supervised all of it and handpicked most of the other agents involved.

Wray’s job was to muck out this mess, disclose the wrongdoing, fire the bad guys, and win back public support. To put it bluntly: he has failed at the job. He has failed the country, the president, and his fellow agents.

Firing Wray before the election would be too incendiary. It would instantly descend into a partisan food fight, like all American politics these days, and would cloud the important work of U.S. Attorney John Durham. But if Wray cannot be fired immediately, neither should he be allowed to block the public from seeing what went wrong at the bureau. That’s exactly what he has been doing, and it needs to stop.

Wray shouldn’t be allowed to hide or slow-walk the evidence that American citizens have every right to see. Remember, it was the current FBI team, not Jim Comey, that said it couldn’t find Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s devastating text messages. It was the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, not Wray’s agents, who discovered the “lost” messages and thousands more. They were released by Rod Rosenstein, who was effectively running DoJ at the time. The FBI brass were not happy.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/02/the_left_couldnt_care_less_about_blacks_143347.html

A typical left-wing reaction to all this was written in June 2019 by journalist Michael Coard in the Philadelphia Tribune: “Today’s black so-called thugs/monsters are created by the evil American system that miseducates them, unemploys them, underemploys them, over-polices them, and over-incarcerates them. America is Dr. Victor Frankenstein.” Note “over-polices.”

Coard is correct about one thing: Today’s blacks are often miseducated, which leads to their unemployment, underemployment and other terrible consequences. Who has been running America’s schools for decades now? (Hint: Not the right.) But that doesn’t cause violence. Black murderers and rapists are the only people in America told that no matter what they did, they are not responsible for it. America is. And the people telling them that are all on the left.

Why does the left do this?

First, because, as opposed to liberals, the left — everywhere in the world — hates America. And why does the left hate America? Because it is a living refutation of left-wing ideology. America is the most successful country while also being the most capitalist, most religious and most nationality-affirming of all the industrialized democracies.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/02/whats-trump-got-to-do-with-the-george-floyd-riots/

On Monday, Trump delivered remarks on the situation. He said that a “small minority of folks who’ve resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment. … I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed.” He said “let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it.”

Almost everything connected George Floyd’s tragic death and the subsequent riots involve Democratic leaders. So naturally, President Donald Trump is taking the blame.

Start at the beginning. George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, a liberal city (the New York Times calls it “one of America’s most liberal cities”) in a liberal state (that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1972). 

In 2017, Larry Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, observed that “In Minneapolis, we have one of the most liberal activist agendas in the U.S. They are seeking to accomplish at the municipal level what isn’t being done at the federal level.”

Even that wasn’t liberal enough for city dwellers, who booted out a liberal mayor in November 2017 for an even more leftist mayor, Jacob Frey. He ran promising more affordable housing and, if you can believe it, improved police-community relations.

Meanwhile, almost every city where riots have broken out is a deep blue enclave that has been run by Democrats for many years. In fact, all but a handful voted for Hillary Clinton by wide margins — New York, for example, went 64% for Hillary, Chicago, 67%, Los Angeles, 69%,  Portland, 64%, San Francisco, 82%. In Minneapolis, Hillary got 57% of the vote. The riots also appear to be aided and abetted by professional left-wing agitators.

You’d think that those most responsible for maintaining law and order would bear the brunt of the criticism for the ongoing mayhem, wouldn’t you?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/illusion-peaceful-protestors-bruce-thornton/

Last week we watched the sorry spectacle of aimless destruction supposedly in response to the death of a black man at the hands of the police. The predictable script from Ferguson and Baltimore was reprised, the same bumper-sticker empty slogans brandished, and the same pointless destruction and looting occurred that were worse than useless for solving the injustice the protestors supposedly want remedied.

Just as predictable was the media coverage, which mixed ratings-bait lurid footage of the violence with clichés like “peaceful protestors,” youthful passionate idealists moved by righteous anger over racial injustice, but compromised by “outside agitators” exploiting the tragedy for their own nefarious extremist ends, most likely alt-right and white supremacist ones. And, of course, the blue-state mayors and governors whose appeasing riot-control protocols worsened the riots while frantically trying to avoid blame and exploit them for their own political aims.

What is missing, as usual, is the truth about these protests and their alleged causes––They’re all about politics, not justice.

One thing that is obvious from watching the footage is that these riots have become a rite of passage for the college-age demographic, a sort of “woke” spring break memorialized by cell-phone cameras, selfies, tweets, Instagram, and Facebook postings. The other cohort comprises the shock-troops of left-over leftism like Antifa, the same bougie thrill-seekers and political illiterates who filled the ranks of Occupy Wall Street and the other international outfits that regularly protest at meetings of the IMF and G7.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/06/01/george-floyds-brother-condemns-riots-calls-for-destructive-unity-to-end-n479504

Terrence Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, condemned the rioting that’s happening nationwide.

Floyd spoke with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America, and described his brother as “a gentle giant” who “was about peace” and a “motivator” who “always saw the lighter, the brighter side of things.”

He added that the riots and violent protests are “overshadowing” his brother’s memory. “They may call it unity, but it’s destructive unity.” Terrence explained that his brother “would want us to seek justice” but would want people to channel their anger “another way.”

“It’s OK to be angry, but channel your anger to do something positive or make a change another way because we’ve been down this road already.”

“The anger, damaging your hometown is not the way he’d want,” he added.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-nothing-matters-rioters/

It was a funny thing over the weekend. You could turn on CNN and find officials deploring the violence in Minneapolis. You could hear rapper Killer Mike exhorting his fellow Atlantans “to be better than burning down our own homes.” You could listen to George Floyd’s girlfriend, who said that seeing Minneapolis in flames would have devastated her slain beau.

And then you could log on to Facebook and find people lionizing the riots as the next Boston Tea Party.

It’s hard to think of anything more privileged than social media armchairs excusing violence against our poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods. But so it goes in the Nothing Matters quarter of America. This weekend saw the unrest that began in Minnesota spread across the country. In Louisville, vandals smashed windows and attacked restaurants and hotels. In Washington, D.C., the White House was briefly locked down amid rowdy protests outside. In Oakland, two federal officers were shot; one died. And in Minneapolis itself, the arson and looting continued, drawing out the largest National Guard mobilization in Minnesota history.

All this was done ostensibly to express fury over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman, as well as other episodes of brutality against African Americans, the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Yet there was something else at work too. Officials estimated Saturday morning that only 20 percent of the rioters in Minneapolis were actually from Minnesota, and while that was later walked back, reporting confirms that the city has become a bug light for out-of-state anarchists and agitators. Pittsburgh’s police chief, meanwhile, said protests there had been hijacked by “white males” dressed in black. And in Rochester, where cars were flipped over and set ablaze, police blamed “anarchists” and “paid protesters.”