RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16610/black-lives-matter-appraisals-3

“I have no objection to the statement ‘black lives matter.’ But the movement that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before it. There will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere.” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

“In my old neighborhood in West Philadelphia, they burned down a Walmart…. How do you justify the destruction in the black community in the name of promoting social justice for blacks?” — Robert L. Woodson.

“All of these corporations… that give a dollar or millions of dollars to the BLM agenda, they are destroying black lives.” — Niger Innis.

“Here is the real truth: America has accepted the idea that every person who is a citizen of the United States ought to be considered equal before the law. BLM is asking for something different: that black people should receive better treatment than other citizens…. Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, maybe even a hundred million dollars have been collected without any reporting requirements, without any justification for what these resources are going to go toward.” — Horace Cooper.

“Little Yummy was an eleven-year-old murderer. He got murdered at eleven by a 14-year-old who is doing life in prison now…. Where was his father? … It starts in the home. My three closest friends did 15-25 years in prison… I was the only one who had a father in my life. I had a father who was a gentle man and a good example — they didn’t.” — Denzel Washington.

“There is no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it is a Marxist political organization. It is not about black death. It is not about black men. It is a political move. It is a communist political move.” — Jason Whitlock, Fox News, July 7, 2020.

“Police don’t wake up and think, ‘I’m going to kill a n*gger today or kill a white man.’ They’re just trying to make it back home to their family in one piece.” — Muhammad Ali Jr.

This multi-part series (Part I here, Part II here) focuses on the perspectives of blacks — conservative, liberal or libertarian — who appraise BLM and its agenda. The following selection of commentary by blacks from all walks of life — actors, athletes, businesspeople, civil rights activists, clergy, commentators, physicians and politicians — demonstrates that black public opinion is not monolithic and that BLM does not speak for all African Americans.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/trump-escaping-wile-e-coyotevirus/

Media meltdown over Trump’s COVID case is the latest sortie in a four-year effort to destroy his campaign and then presidency.

O nce it was announced that President Trump had COVID-19, the media almost immediately talked of all the people in the “Trump orbit” who fell ill from COVID-19 — including many on his staff, U.S. senators, and at least three White House reporters.

The surreal subtext was not that the toxic Trump had been infected by someone else. Apparently reporters, in their Trump-obsessed universe, believed in some mysterious Aristotelian concept of spontaneous generation, by which his self-spawned coronavirus germs had sickened all within his deadly circuit. Or perhaps Trump was guilty of catching the germ from one of his staffers, who in turn would never have been sickened if they had never been close to Trump in the first place. The possibility that the White House “positive” reporters might have been careless at times or might’ve infected others was never entertained.

Within a few hours, the usual camps and suspects weighed in. Former Clinton and Obama staffer Zara Rahim prayed for Trump’s demise and celebrated his infection with a terse “I hope he dies.” The Washington Post hastily took down an official Twitter feed automatically posting an op-ed column expressing a similar hope for a dead president: “Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again,” on the realization that running such a headline while Trump was sick “rendered it tasteless”— as if it was not tasteless when he was well. Write that after swapping the name “Obama” for “Trump,” and the FBI would have shown up at their doors.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-covid-and-reason-11602026102?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Trump’s tweet Monday “Don’t be afraid of Covid” has invited more criticism that he’s again downplaying the virus. Mr. Trump doesn’t do nuance, and he and his team have often acted recklessly, most prominently at the Rose Garden ceremony announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination. But scientists generally agree with his fundamental point that Americans need to learn to live with the virus.

That’s also the message of a new declaration from scientists that the media are ignoring. Organized by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration recommends that people be allowed to live normally while protecting the vulnerable. The authors are infectious-disease experts, and the statement by our deadline had been signed by more than 2,300 medical and health scientists and 2,500 practitioners, and counting.

They describe their approach as “Focused Protection,” but it’s essentially what Sweden has done and even the World Health Organization is now recommending. Many European leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron are also slowly embracing it, though it still remains heresy on America’s left.

The collateral damage from government lockdowns “include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” the declaration says. “Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”