RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/founding-era-antislavery-and-the-overheated-freakout-over-tom-cottons-history-of-slavery/

The Founders did have a plan to abolish slavery; it just didn’t work out the way they expected.

As John McCormack notes, Tom Cotton may have been awkward in his phrasing, but there is nothing shocking in saying of slavery, “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” Jonathan Chait writes:

Cotton seems not to be saying that slavery was necessary in order to get slave owners to accept the union, but that it was necessary to the “development of our country.” Here, oddly enough, he is recapitulating one of the most important errors in the 1619 Project itself.

There are two ways to read “necessary”: that slavery was necessary to build the country, or that tolerating the pre-existing institution was necessary because nationwide abolition was politically and perhaps economically and socially infeasible in 1776 or 1787. I agree with Chait that the 1619 Project is off-base in claiming the former; I do not read Cotton as saying that, and the people who are jumping on him over this are, it appears, just people who already hate Tom Cotton.

The formulation that slavery was tolerated as a necessary evil at the time of the Founding, and that the Founders expected (overoptimistically) that it was on an inevitable path to extinction, is a fairly standard one, and mostly an accurate way of putting the more complicated story of Founding-era slavery and anti-slavery into a nutshell. It most accurately captures the views of the Virginia Founders (such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason), who saw slavery as wrong — unlike John C. Calhoun and his followers in a later generation, who framed it as a positive good — but were unwilling or unable to face the effort to end it. It also accurately captures the view of anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who concluded that it was not worth breaking up the new nation in a vain effort to force the South to abandon slavery immediately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-protesters-injure-six-federal-agents-with-fireworks-lasers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

At least six federal agents were injured during demonstrations in Portland Friday night when protesters launched fireworks at them and shone lasers at their eyes.

Protests have been nearly constant in Oregon’s largest city since the police custody death of George Floyd in May. Local officials have called for federal law enforcement agents deployed by the Trump administration to leave as nightly violence continues to rock the city. Some protests have been peaceful, but demonstrators who remain on the streets after dark have engaged in property destruction, throwing rocks at police, marking buildings with graffiti, and setting fires.

One agent had his hearing deadened and suffered bloody lacerations and burns on both his forearms after protesters shot a firework over the fence, the Associated Press reported. Other agents helped him to strip down to his boxers and T-shirt so his injuries could be photographed for evidence. The injured agent said he was more worried about his hearing than the injuries on his arms.

Another agent was hit in the head by a commercial-grade firework and suffered a concussion, and several agents left the demonstrations with vision issues resulting from lasers that the protesters pointed at their faces. Of the six agents injured, at least one was hospitalized.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/mccloekey-saga.html

The McClosky story deserves a recapitulation.

On June 28th, When protesters marched along his private street in St. Louis on Sunday, Mark McCloskey and his wife emerged barefoot from their mansion to wave and point loaded weapons at the crowd. Video of the fiery scene instantly went viral, even being retweeted — and then deleted — by President Trump.

But in an interview with CNN’s Chris Como on Tuesday night, McCloskey said he and his wife, Patricia, were in fact the ones being threatened.

 In July the police seized the rifile held by  Mark McCloskey.

Mark and his wife, Patricia, were not charged. Joel Schwartz, the couple’s lawyer, said a search warrant was served Friday evening and that the gun Mark McCloskey was holding in the video was seized. Schwartz told The Associated Press that arrangements have been made to turn over to authorities on Saturday the gun that Patricia McCloskey had been holding, adding that her gun was inoperable at the time of the protest and still is.

The couple have  been charged, and Schwartz said charges against them would be “absolutely, positively unmerited.”

Patricia McCloskey’s pistol was removed as well, but the DA decided to render it operable and capable of shooting by having forensics diddle with the pins. This was on order by Kim Gardner, the prosecuter.

The pro-Second Amendment McCloskey couple was seemingly framed for firearms abuses to push the Democrats’ anti-gun agenda, according to reports.