RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2020/06/01/breaking-rioters-burn-historic-st-johns-church-in-d-c-deface-monuments-across-the-city-n474820

“Meanwhile, more than 50 Secret Service agents have been injured tonight by the “peaceful protesters.” The city is under a curfew and under the protection of the National Guard, but that hasn’t stopped the rioters from causing mayhem and destruction across the city.”

St. John’s Episcopal Church at Lafayette Square in the District of Columbia burned Sunday night, having been set ablaze by rioters in another long night of nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer dug his knee into the handcuffed man’s neck until he stopped breathing.St. John’s, built in 1816, has been called the church of presidents—every president, beginning with James Madison, has attended a service there. It’s located a stone’s throw from the White House.

Benny Johnson notes that President Lincoln prayed in St. John’s. That didn’t stop the violent mob from torching it.

Fox News is reporting at this hour that the fire, which began in the parish office of the church, has been extinguished by D.C. firefighters.

Rioters also defaced many of D.C.’s beloved monuments.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-and-disorder-11590959305?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

The violence that broke out in American cities this weekend goes far beyond justified anger at the killing of George Floyd on Monday. The rioters are looting shops and attacking police with impunity, and they threaten a larger breakdown of public order. Protecting the innocent and restoring order is the first duty of government.

The violent scenes in more than 30 cities were the worst in decades. Minneapolis police were overrun on Friday as neighborhoods and a police precinct burned. Los Angeles police were assaulted and their vehicles vandalized and burned. In Milwaukee a 38-year-old police officer was shot and 16 buildings were looted. In Dallas a shopowner trying to defend his property with a machete was stoned, beaten and left bleeding in the street.

Americans watching on TV saw reporters grabbed and pushed by protesters who flashed obscene gestures for the cameras. Police were pelted with rocks and bottles amid “Defund the Police” signs. Mayors across the country set curfews, and in Minneapolis and elsewhere the National Guard was called in.***

This was more than spontaneous anger at the grotesque video of a white cop, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of the African-American Floyd for nearly nine minutes as he pleaded to breathe. Many protests were peaceful. But the riots in many places had the earmarks of planned chaos by those using Floyd as an excuse for criminality.

https://www.city-journal.org/terrifying-collapse-of-the-rule-of-law

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

On Friday, May 29, Minnesota governor Tim Walz explained his reluctance to mobilize the National Guard as an unwillingness to seem “oppressive.” Naturally, he apologized for his white privilege—“I will not patronize you as a white man without living [your] lived experiences”—and explained the feral violence as an understandable response to racial injustice: “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish, unheard.” Few arrests were made after five days of rampant crime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_trace_act_and_the_rule_of_law.html

The TRACE Act will not keep Americans healthy or safe. Instead, it will erode what remains of our constitutional freedoms — freedoms which have been all but washed away during the pandemic’s hysteria

On May 1, 2020, Democratic congressman Bobby Rush introduced bill H.R. 6666, otherwise known as the “Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone Act” (“TRACE Act”).

Ostensibly, the TRACE Act will limit the spread of COVID-19 by creating “mobile health units” that will “conduct diagnostic testing… trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals” and then “support the quarantine of such contacts.” The TRACE Act allocates $100 billion in federal funds to facilitate this project.

Rush says “increased testing and contact tracing is the only way we will get back normal and safely reopen our economy.” Basically, Rush’s position is that America should remained locked down until everyone is tested.

The TRACE Act will not keep Americans healthy or safe. Instead, it will erode what remains of our constitutional freedoms — freedoms which have been all but washed away during the pandemic’s hysteria.

Although the TRACE ACT has been sponsored by over 50 congressmen it received very little media coverage. Briefly: how does bill H.R. 6666 work?

Section 2(a) of the TRACE Act provides that the government may award grants to “eligible entities” to conduct “diagnostic testing for COVID-19”, to “trace and monitor the contacts” of any infected people, and to “support the quarantine of such contacts.” This will be administered by (1) “mobile health units,” which will provide services relating to “testing and quarantine” at people’s residences. The TRACE Act appropriates $100 billion in 2020 to carry out the above mission.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/31/blaming-white-supremacists-for-the-riots-is-nonsensical-gaslighting/

I can’t believe they even tried it. On Saturday morning Minnesota officials came out with an audacious and absurd explanation for the looting and arson that struck Minneapolis this week. Apparently it was white supremacists from out of state who pretended to be actual protestors in an attempt to discredit the protest. The evidence? A vague claim and a lie. It turns out that most of those arrested were actually Minnesota residents.

The hypocritical mental gymnastics from the liberal media in the past 72 hours were amazing enough to earn a perfect 10 from the stingiest East German judge. First, we watched tens of thousands of people hold mass gatherings across the country, which just last week we were told would kill everyone, and the media suddenly didn’t care. It’s like the Chinese virus just went away by magic.

Next we were informed that the looting and arson we witnessed from the protesters was simply the language of the oppressed and how could we even comment about it when another black man was killed by the police. Celebrities posted bail for the heroes of Minneapolis. And yes, the brutal killing of George Floyd is an occasion for outrage.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/05/30/big-tech-big-money-the-face-of-the-new-left-n468678

Big Tech in league with Big Money has been asserting itself for some time as the face of the New Left, establishing a digital panopticon to control public opinion, keep tabs on users, and possibly to sway the result of national elections. The result is a species of high-tech totalitarianism practiced by a raft of billionaires, unrepentant capitalists who paradoxically manifest as techno-Marxists. Their activities are generating a radical transmutation in our way of life, gradually depriving us of agency and independence.

Co-founder of Amazon and owner of Pravda-like The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is in the order of $147 billion. His fortune, as Franklin Foer writes in an article titled It’s Jeff Bezos’s Planet Now, is not mitigated by the tax collector or constrained by antitrust laws. The Jeff Bezos Earth fund will disburse $10 billion in the name of fighting climate change, perhaps the greatest government fraud of the current age.

“Bezos has begun to subsume the powers of the state,” Foer continues, funding the exploration of space and spending $700 million “to retrain workers in the shadow of automation and displacement.”

“When Amazon locates its second headquarters on the Potomac,” Foer speculates, “it will provide a perfect geographic encapsulation of the new balance of power.” Meanwhile, Bezos is using his WaPo bully pulpit to promote far left, anti-Trump and feminist screeds filled with doctrinaire misinformation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-president-has-the-constitutional-power-to-restore-order-he-must-act/

What has happened over the last few nights in major cities of the United States is unacceptable. It has gotten worse because of federal and state passivity.

Law enforcement is a vital response to any riotous uprising. Indeed, I believe the failure to enforce the laws without apology from the start of the upheaval last week has fueled its ferocity. It would be naïve to claim that much of the violence, which is being incited and coordinated by radical groups, might not have happened anyway — these groups are always on a hair-trigger, pouncing on any opportunity to make mayhem. But how badly things get out of control has a lot to do with the resolve of state and federal law enforcement. The laws do not enforce themselves.

Progressive dogma notwithstanding, rioting spearheaded by radicals and anarchists does not exhaust itself if governments just give them time and space to get their yah-yahs out. Passivity, conveying the message that the laws will not be enforced, is provocative. It increases the appetite for rioting, which is only sated once the sociopaths have run out of things to burn and loot.

That said, law enforcement on its own is inadequate to restore order once order has been lost. Police and prosecutorial offices simply do not have the resources to quell widespread seditionist violence. Consequently, other provisions of law must be considered.