RUTHFULLY YOURS

1,000 “public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders.” The letter argues that it’s okay if the current protests/riots spread COVID-19 because racism is itself a public-health issue that needs to be addressed.

Let’s take that argument seriously for a moment and ask a follow-up question: Why, then, was there so much criticism of the anti-lockdown protests? The premise of those protests was that continuing lockdowns caused far more economic damage than was necessary. If anything is a public-health issue, surely record unemployment, social isolation, and bans on people going to hospitals for non-urgent care should count.

Well, here is how the letter distinguishes between anti-racism protests and anti-lockdown protests:

. . . [W]e do not condemn these [anti-racism] gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States . . . . This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.

It’s difficult to understand how any reasonable person could have committed those words to print. Even just, “Yeah, we’re hypocrites, so what?” would have been a more satisfying response.

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

Project Veritas ought to be called Project Fortitudo so as to recognize the mind-boggling bravery of an undercover operative who infiltrated the Rose City Antifa organization in Portland, Oregon, one of the oldest active Antifa groups in America. The anarcho-leftist Antifa specializes in violent street fighting, putting at extreme risk anyone who goes into the group with a hidden camera.

That’s the risk a Project Veritas investigator took, beginning sometime in the past, but at least eleven months ago. (To protect the investigator’s identity, the year in which he began his undercover operation is bleeped out.)

Although Antifa has leaped to prominence in the past few days, as it’s joined forces with Black Lives Matter to wreak havoc in American cities, conservatives have been aware of it for some time. For most of us, Antifa became a concern beginning with the Berkeley rioting when the Berkeley Republicans invited conservative speakers, such as Milo Yiannopoulos or Ben Shapiro, to the UC campus. Even the Washington Post noticed that Antifa had a problem.

Antifa members showed up and engaged in extreme violence, including setting fire to the campus. As a hint that Antifa is the paramilitary arm of the Berkeley Democrat party, the mayor told the police to stand down as Antifa and other leftist organizations beat conservatives with poles, pepper spray, and fists. Rose City Antifa gets the same sweet treatment from Portland’s mayor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-the-looting-ruins-11591313813?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Luis Tamay is an immigrant with an Ecuadorean restaurant in Minneapolis. Zola Dias is the black owner of a clothing store in Atlanta. Sam Mabrouk has a denim shop in Columbus, Ohio. They’re only a few of the people whom intellectuals overlook whenever they rationalize rioting or say that property destruction isn’t violence.

“Seventeen years of work is gone,” Mr. Tamay told the Minneapolis Star Tribune after his restaurant, El Sabor Chuchi, burned to the ground. When the rioting began, he stood watch. But last Friday he obeyed curfew, believing that the National Guard would control the streets. Then on Facebook he saw video of his restaurant on fire. He told the newspaper he didn’t have insurance because it was too expensive.

Safia Munye, a Somali immigrant in Minneapolis, opened Mama Safia’s Kitchen in 2018 with money saved for retirement. When the pandemic arrived, NPRreported, she couldn’t afford both insurance and to pay her workers. She did the latter. Now the restaurant is wrecked, but she’s hardly the intended target of George Floyd protesters. “My heart is broken. My mind is broken,” she said. “I know I can’t come back from this. But this can be replaced. George’s life cannot. George’s life was more important.”

In Atlanta, Zola Dias lost more than $100,000 in goods from his clothing store, Attom. “I’m very emotional when I talk about it because I put my soul and life in this business,” he told the Atlanta Business Chronicle. “I just want to tell people to go and vote. That’s the only way to stop it and make a change.”

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/04/on-racism/print/#comments_controls

“Where do we see evidence of white supremacists? Are statues of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan being pulled down? Is the Lincoln Memorial covered in graffiti?  Are white supremacists rewriting American history in the universities and at the New York Times? Where are their magazines and newspapers? Who are their representatives in government and media? What is the power of such an invisible group?”

If white people are racist, how was Obama twice elected president of the United States?  That such questions do not occur to those shouting “white racism” indicates weak minds, the presence of anti-whites out to make mischief, and people who speak on the basis of an unexamined assumption that has been drilled into their heads.
The unexamined question is: Are white people racist by nature?  Those who say whites are racist by nature simultaneously claim that hundreds of thousands of Lincoln’s soldiers died in order to free black people from slavery and that white people in the North carried on a relentless long war against white people in the South for the benefit of black people.  

It is these same racist white people who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act 56 years ago and permitted the establishment of racial quotas and contract set-asides for blacks that gave blacks rights and privileges that white people do not have. 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/right-from-wrong-ellen-degeneres-george-floyd-and-iyad-al-halak-630423

SADLY, LOVE, peace and communication are far from the minds of the looters who have been destroying storefronts and stealing anything they can lay their hands on.

World-famous television host Ellen DeGeneres could not have predicted what was in store for her this week when she posted a message of mourning over the brutal killing in Minnesota of hitherto unknown African-American George Floyd.

On May 30, five days after Floyd was dealt a slow and sadistic death blow by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin – while three of his fellow men-in-blue stood by and did nothing – DeGeneres tweeted: “Like so many of you, I am angry and I am sad.
People of color in this country have faced injustice for far too long. For things to change, things must change. We must commit ourselves to this change with conviction and love.”DeGeneres is a brilliant comedian, but her followers did not find the tweet the least bit funny. Nor did they consider it appropriate. On the contrary, they took great offense to her wording.

“This statement is meaningless and a back door to All Lives Matter,” one person responded. “For things to change, we must first acknowledge specifically that #BlackLivesMatter.”