RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lancets-politicized-science-on-antimalarial-drugs-11591053222?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Lancet’s decision to publish the study with little apparent scrutiny also suggests politics may be influencing its scientific judgment. An unsigned editorial in May criticized President Trump’s “inconsistent and incoherent national response” to the pandemic and asserted that “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.” The Lancet editors should focus on healing themselves.”

President Trump has often mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for Covid-19. Last month he announced that he was taking the antimalaria drug, also known as HCL, as a prophylaxis after two White House staffers tested positive for the virus. Mr. Trump’s critics in the press seem to be on a mission to discredit the therapy. Now a prestigious medical journal may be joining in.

The Lancet published a study on May 22 that purported to find a 30% increased risk of death for hospitalized Covid-19 patients treated with HCL or chloroquine, a related treatment. “Study says drug hailed by Trump is harmful,” the Washington Post reported. The World Health Organization suspended its HCL trial. France, Belgium and Italy announced they would prohibit the drug for the treatment of Covid patients.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/06/01/two-nyc-corporate-lawyers-charged-in-failed-molotov-cocktail-attack-on-nypd-n2569817

Two Brooklyn lawyers, including an Ivy League graduate corporate attorney, are facing federal charges over accusations they tossed a Molotov cocktail into an NYPD vehicle early Saturday morning during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd.

Colinford Mattis, 32, a corporate lawyer and member of Community Board 5 in East New York, was charged along with fellow attorney Urooj Rahman with the attempted attack on an empty police cruiser parked outside the 88th Precinct station house in Fort Greene.

[…]

Authorities say Rahman, 31, tossed a bottle filled with gasoline through a broken window into the cruiser just before 1 am Saturday but the Molotov cocktail failed to ignite. Rahman jumped into a van driven by Mattis and they sped off, court papers allege.

The attempted torching was captured by video surveillance cameras outside the precinct stationhouse on DeKalb Ave., according to court papers.

Cops gave chase and stopped the van nearby on Willoughby St. They found the makings of another Molotov cocktail in the back seat along with a gasoline container, authorities say.

“No rational human being can ever believe that hurling firebombs at police officers and vehicles is justified,” said Brooklyn U.S Attorney Richard Donoghue.

This isn’t about Floyd anymore, folks. Maybe for a millisecond, it was and that’s sad—because there appear to be protests mostly in smaller urban and suburban areas where it is peaceful. There’s also footage of officers voicing support for the protests and praying with the activists. As for the mob, however, President Trump has to make moves to put it down. It’s been nearly a week of chaos. It’s time to re-establish law and order. 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/01/minneapolis-rioters-burned-one-of-americas-most-beloved-independent-bookstores-to-the-ground/

Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s were legendary among the community of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery readers—and now they’re gone.

Venerable Minneapolis science fiction and fantasy bookstore Uncle Hugo’s and its sister store in the same building, Uncle Edgar’s, which specialized in mysteries, were both burned to ruins last Friday night by rioters.

The store took its name from two major awards in the genre fields, science fiction’s Hugo awards, and mysteries Edgar’s. Independent bookstores are a threatened American institution, and Uncle Hugo’s was considered a flagship operation. Owner Don Blyly was noted for his ability to adapt to modern bookselling conditions and serve an audience of devoted genre readers. With most independent book shops, the margins are low and often owners are in the business as much for love as for money. For Don Blyly, it doesn’t matter anymore.

The books are burned. His shop is gone.

“There was a call from the security company around 3:30 this morning that the motion detector was showing somebody in the building. I threw on clothes and headed over there,” said Blyly in an email. “When I was 2 blocks away, I received a call that the smoke detectors were showing smoke in the store. Every single building on both sides of Chicago was blazing and dozens of people dancing around.”

Uncle Hugo’s was located at 2864 Chicago Avenue, in Minneapolis. Blyly pulled into the parking lot belonging to the dentist office next door to his shop. Flames were already leaping out the front windows of the Uncle Hugo’s side of the store.

“It looked to me like they had broken every window on the front of the Uncles and then squirted accelerant through each broken window. It looked hopeless to me, but I went around to the back door to see if I could get to a fire extinguisher. As soon as I opened the back door a wave of very thick black smoke poured out, so I quickly closed the door again.”

https://spectator.org/misquoting-mlk-to-legitimize-violence/

It was inevitable that George Floyd’s death would spark protests against police brutality and that mendacity would characterize the attendant media coverage. True to form, the press affected dismay when the demonstrations devolved into violence, yet reported the riots with obvious approbation. The most obscene example of this was the widespread use, in headlines and ledes, of an out-of-context Martin Luther King quote suggesting that the civil rights leader would have condoned the mayhem. USA Today, for example, ran a feature story bearing the following title: “ ‘A riot is the language of the unheard’: MLK’s powerful quote resonates amid George Floyd protests.”

This grotesque misrepresentation of Dr. King’s views is only possible by cynically cherry-picking eight words from a 1966 interview during which he repeatedly emphasized that violence was counterproductive to the progress of the civil rights movement. Mike Wallace interviewed him for “CBS Reports” on Sept. 27, 1966, and the primary topic of discussion involved divisions within the movement concerning overall strategy. The myth that King had somehow endorsed violence went mainstream in 2013, when “60 Minutes Rewind” posted a clip from the Wallace interview and irresponsibly titled it using the same out-of-context quote. The interview transcript begins with this unambiguous statement:

KING: I will never change in my basic idea that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. I think for the Negro to turn to violence would be both impractical and immoral.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/500315-it-wasnt-just-religious-liberty-that-chief-

The big story is even bigger than it appears to be at first blush.

Close to midnight on Friday, while rioters used the killing of George Floyd as a pretext to set America aflame, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling that declined to enjoin the states of California and Illinois from restrictions on communal worship imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Most startling was that Chief Justice John Roberts not only joined the court’s four left-leaning justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) in declining to uphold religious liberty. Roberts also wrote a brief opinion explaining his decision. 

That opinion is an eye-opener. Roberts accords the right to worship no deference by virtue of its being a fundamental liberty expressly protected by the First Amendment. We are to see it as an activity like any other activity, commercial or social, the pros and cons of which technocrats must weigh in fashioning regulations. The opinion, moreover, champions the power of government officials to dictate to the people who elect them without “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary” — exactly the power that the Bill of Rights, and the incorporation jurisprudence by which the court has applied much of it to the states, are meant to deny.

This is truly remarkable because it is so gratuitous. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/californians-object-islamic-call-prayer-over-robert-spencer/

Diversity is being duly celebrated in the Los Angeles area these days, as neighbors of the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City are now treated to what Barack Obama called the most beautiful sound in the world, the Islamic call to prayer, blared over loudspeakers five times a day, beginning at 4:30AM. And lo and behold, some Culver City residents have had the temerity, the audacity, the unrestrained “Islamophobia,” to complain about the noise. As Greta Thunberg might say, How dare they? Don’t they know they live in California, and that California is the most woke of states?

It’s likely that most of the people who were complaining were Leftists who, in other contexts, would denounce concern about jihad violence and Sharia oppression as “Islamophobia” and “bigotry.” So now they have what they have wanted and enabled. They should be very proud. They can get up at 4:30 every morning and celebrate diversity.

This is happening all over the world, notably in the United States, Canada, and Germany: cities are amending or ignoring their noise ordinances to allow the Islamic call to prayer (adhan) to be broadcast over loudspeakers. Officials in Europe and the U.S. have explained this as an effort to comfort Muslims who in quarantine because of the coronavirus; however, none of those who have offered this explanation seem to have made any efforts to comfort Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or anyone else.