Displaying posts published in

April 2021

‘Enemy of the People’: Minneapolis Star-Tribune Publishes Biographical Information of Derek Chauvin Trial Jurors By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/20/enemy-of-the-people-minneapolis-star-tribune-publishes-biographical-information-of-derek-chauvin-trial-jurors/

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is being blasted online for releasing biographical information of all twelve jurors plus two alternates in the Derek Chauvin trial in the killing of George Floyd.

Without naming the jurors, reporters Paul Walsh and Hannah Sayle on Tuesday published enough details about their lives, internet sleuths and local snoops may be able to figure out who they are.

Walsh is a general assignment reporter at the Star-Tribune, and Sayle is a digital features editor. Online critics are accusing the paper of trying to intimidate the jurors into reaching a guilty verdict.

The reporters provided general information about the jurors’ ages, race, professions, where they’re from, and where they went to school. They even leaked that one juror is related to an area police officer.

Abby Simone, the “public safety” editor for the Star-Tribune, shared the story on Twitter.

“Why does the “public safety editor” think it’s ok to publish enough information to identify these jurors?” asked one Twitter user.

Some Twitter users like former Trump Campaign advisor Steve Cortes and conservative journalist Rachel Bovard argued that the article was clearly designed to intimidate the jury.

“Why are you making it easier to dox, harass, and threaten jurors?” asked Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor. “Do you want the mob to come for them? Do you have no journalistic integrity?”

Supreme Court’s failures are putting America on a path to tyranny By Clifford C. Nichols

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/supreme_courts_failures_are_putting_america_on_a_path_to_tyranny.html

Rarely do the generation experiencing the actual events and decisions that lead to their nation’s demise fully appreciate the enormity of their oversight until sometime after their culture’s destruction has been rendered incurable.  Largely, it is not due so much to their negligence as it is to most of them being too preoccupied with simply living and making a living.

Perhaps that would explain why, in just the first four months of 2021, the Supreme Court issued four decisions — or, perhaps better viewed as non-decisions — that should have caused all legitimately patriotic Americans to be alarmed and called to action…but did not seem to. 

Only a few weeks ago, without offering any substantive explanation, the Court summarily refused to even look at — much less seriously consider — any of the evidence of the 2020 election irregularities offered by attorney Sidney Powell and others.  Evidently, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was not interested in doing what it could — and should — to let America know decisively whether or not its presidential election had been shamelessly stolen by those now in power.

Why would they not do this?

Perhaps the answer is best revealed by the fact that, at the same time, the Court was also apparently too busy to halt a New York prosecutor from obtaining former president Trump’s tax returns.  The practical effect was for SCOTUS to give that prosecutor an assist with his unconstitutional effort to search for any crime that might make President Trump’s ouster from office permanent.

Supreme Court Might Reverse Chauvin Convictions because of Maxine Waters by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17302/derek-chauvin-conviction-supreme-court

The Minnesota appellate courts might not reverse the conviction but the United States Supreme Court well might, as they have done in other cases involving jury intimidation.

In seeking to put her thumb on the scales of justice, Rep. Maxine Waters perhaps unwittingly borrowed a tactic right out of the Deep South of the early 20th century.

In the Deep South during the 1920s and ’30s, elected politicians would organize demonstrations by white voters in front of courthouses in which racially charged trials were being conducted. The politicians then threatened, explicitly or implicitly, that violence would follow the acquittal of a black defendant or the conviction of a white defendant. The U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts reversed several convictions based on these tactics of intimidation.

The judge in the Chauvin trial made a serious error in not sequestering the jury during the entire trial.

Already, we have seen blood sprayed over the former home of a witness who testified for Chauvin; the defendant’s lawyers have received threats. An aura of violence is in the air. Jurors breathe that same air….

This is not the Deep South in the 1920s. It is the “Identity Politics” of the 21st century. But the motives of the protesters are not relevant to whether jurors in the Chauvin case could be expected to consider the evidence objectively without fear of the kind of intimidation threatened by Waters.

The evidence, in my view, supports a verdict of manslaughter, but not of murder. Any verdict that did not include a conviction for murder was likely to be unacceptable to Waters and her followers, however, even if the facts and the law mandate that result. Waters is not interested in neutral justice. She wants vengeance for what she and her followers justifiably see as the unjustified killing of George Floyd…. That is not the rule of law. That is the passion of the crowd.

We must be certain that threats of intimidation do not influence jury verdicts. That certainty does not exist now in the Chauvin case, thanks largely to the ill-advised threats and demands of Maxine Waters and others.

The convictions of Derek Chauvin might not mark the end of this racially divisive case. The US Supreme Court might ultimately decide whether to uphold the convictions.

Turkey: Erdoğan’s Biggest Political Rival by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17271/turkey-erdogan-political-rival

The lockdown has already put too much economic pressure on small businesses. A total of 125,000 small businesses and shop owners have gone bankrupt during the pandemic. That makes an estimated 500,000 people in Turkey badly affected by the unfortunate blend of economic and pandemic mismanagement…

Growing poverty is seen in other official numbers too. Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez said that power distribution companies cut electricity supplies to 3.7 million households last year due to unpaid debts. That makes more than 10 million Turks having to live without power due to inability to pay bills.

As of December 11, there were 22,759,000 cases of legal proceedings for unpaid debts, corporate and individual. Unemployment is another pressing problem.

This means that means Turkey must maintain its lockdown rules. Further lockdown, however, will mean further economic contraction especially in a country that depends on tourist industry revenues.

The pandemic has further impoverished Turkey’s fragile economy. It threatens to do worse damage to the budgets of poorer families, who are the core of the voting public. One recent study says that Erdoğan loyalists are the biggest number of voters who will vote differently or abstain from voting in the next elections.

Erdoğan’s biggest political rival appears to be poverty.

After 19 years of uninterrupted governance, Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, seems to remain politically unchallenged. With presidential and parliamentary elections 2½ years away, credible research shows he is still the most popular politician, with his closest rival coming far below him in the polls. But he is now facing an unexpected rival that may unseat him.

MetroPOLL, an independent pollster, found recently that Erdoğan’s popularity was at 31%, followed by the main opposition party CHP at 17.4%. If elections were held today, Erdoğan’s ultranationalist coalition partner, MHP, would win 7.2%, bringing the government bloc’s vote up to 38.7%. The opposition bloc, a fragile alliance of six parties from different ideologies, would win an overall 36.1%.

Polls say that Erdoğan’s followers follow him as if they were following the Messiah, both figuratively and literally, rain or sunshine. At a new peak of a national currency crisis in November, a pro-Erdoğan columnist, Ali Karahasanoğlu, wrote that “even if the dollar rate rises to 15 lira (from 8.50) we will not surrender to the executioner.” He wrote: “We’d prefer one dollar to 15 liras instead of 8.50 in order not to see a Turkey that follows America’s orders.”

Professor of Islamic Law: Jews Control the World Through Language A Jordanian professor figures out how the Zionists control the world. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/professor-islamic-law-jews-control-world-through-hugh-fitzgerald/

Department of Down-The-Rabbit-Hole: a Jordanian professor of Islamic law has figured out how the Jews/Zionists control the world: they control the language that we all use, and thereby twist our understanding of things. Endlessly diabolical, those Jews. A report on his remarkable insight is here: “Jordanian Professor Ahmad Nofal: The Jews Rule The World; We Have To Say ‘Zionists’ Instead Of ‘Jews’ Or Else They Cancel Us; Zionists Harvest Palestinians’ Organs,” MEMRI, April 2, 2021:

Jordanian professor Ahmad Nofal said that the Jews rule the world and monitor every word that is said, therefore the word “Zionists” must be used instead of “Jews,” but there is no difference between the two words.

No “difference between the two words”? So all Jews are Zionists? That will come as news to such ferocious anti-Zionist Jews as Peter Beinart, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Ben-Ami and the members of J Street, Ariel Gold and the members of Code Pink, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and so many other Jews who reject the Jewish state, in whole or in part. There is a very big difference. Not all Jews are Zionists. And for that matter, as we all know, not all Zionists are Jews.

And if the Zionists rule the world, they are not doing a very good job of it. If they “rule the world,” why were they unable to prevent the British, who held the Mandate, from lopping off all of Mandatory Palestine east of the River Jordan – 78% of the Mandate’s land area — and turning it over to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah to form the Emirate of Transjordan?

If “Zionists/Jews” rule the world, why is it that they were helpless to prevent the Nazis from murdering six million of their fellow Jews? The Nazis and their willing collaborators killed the Jews in every possible way: shooting them at the edge of pits, so they would topple into them; burying them alive; gassing them to death in gas chambers and in mobile gas vans; burning them alive; torturing them to death; injecting them with diseases and poisonous chemicals; performing ghoulish medical experiments on them. Yet the Jews who, according to Professor Ahmad Nofal, “control the world,” were unable to save their brethren.

They were not even able to persuade any countries to rescue more than a handful of Jews from their Nazi tormentors. America, despite its large Jewish population, turned its back on desperate Jews, refusing to admit them, sending the St. Louis, a ship packed with Jewish refugees, back to Germany where many of them were murdered. Only one country, the Dominican Republic, actually welcomed Jews – some 30,000 — because the country’s ruler, Rafael Trujillo, believed the Jewish refugees would be good for the economy (he turned out to be right).

The D.C. BLM Insurrectionists Get a Pass It’s okay to riot in D.C., and assault government buildings and police officers again. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/dc-blm-insurrectionists-get-pass-daniel-greenfield/

The face of the Black Lives Matter insurrectionist who was arrested in Washington D.C. with an axe, a laser, and a “destructive device” will not be plastered by the FBI over any local billboards. 

The BLM insurrections who rioted in Washington D.C. over the death of Daunte Wright, who had choked a woman to steal her rent money, threw fireworks and heavy objects at police. They shone lasers in the eyes of police officers and vandalized the Columbus monument with the obscene and hateful graffiti of a racist black supremacist movement. And they’ll get a pass.

Even when the racist insurrectionist mob chanted, “burn the precinct to the ground.” 

While the D.C. police department has asked for the public’s helpin identifying one of the BLM insurrections who attacked a police officer and is offering a reward, the national media has not picked up the story the way that it did when there was an effort underway to identify the Capitol rioters, nor has the FBI taken to buying billboards asking anyone who knows the thug for tips.

Fighting with a police officer in January was profoundly morally different than doing so in April. 

That’s all the more striking since the D.C. Metro police force is 52% black, while the Capitol Police are 29% black. Black lives don’t matter when they’re also blue. Just ask Captain Dorn.

Only a handful of months after the media agonized over the spectacle of a riot in D.C. and our political class acted as if fights between protesters and police was some inexplicably horrifying event, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor put together, instead of the top outdoor sport of 2020, it’s okay to riot in D.C., assault government buildings, and call for burning them down.

7 Reasons Why Democrats Are Obsessed With Race From the perspective of power politics, it makes perfect sense. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/7-reasons-why-democrats-are-obsessed-race-don-feder/

It’s almost impossible for a Democrat to get through the day without saying something about race – something really stupid.

Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s UN Ambassador, said white supremacy is “weaved [sic] into our founding documents [including the Constitution] and principles.” You know, like “all men created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” You gotta be a Klansman to believe that stuff.

On the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Red China, which practically runs the UN, systematically suppresses racial minorities which might challenge its rule), Joe Biden — who once said school busing would create a “racial jungle” — again took aim at the “systematic racism and white supremacy” which he says have long plagued our laws and institutions.

“Racism is real in America and always has been,” squawked Kamala Harris, who practically called Biden racist during the Democrat primary campaign.

If systematic racism and white supremacy weren’t enough, the left insists that we also confront “institutionalized racism,” “white privilege,” “white fragility” (whites who refused to admit their racism) and “whiteness” – in order to reach the promised land of “racial justice,” “racial equality” and “racial equity.”

Democrats call anything that challenges their misrule racist – including Georgia’s election reform (an attempt to “disenfranchise minorities”), gun ownership (In 2008, Obama said Middle Americans bitterly cling to guns and “antipathy to people who aren’t like them”), the Electoral College, the Senate filibuster (“a remnant of Jim Crow”), voter ID laws, capitalism and the Constitution.

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #8 Cornell University Caught restricting enrollment by race.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-8-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#8: Cornell University

Racially segregated education was ruled unconstitutional more than 60 years ago in the famous Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, but Cornell University is attempting to revive it in the 21st century.

In a throwback to the era of Jim Crow, a racially-segregated physical education class titled “BIPOC Rock Climbing” was offered at the university during the Spring 2021 academic semester. According to the official course description on the university’s website, course registration was restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.”  In other words, no whites allowed.

When conservative watchdog group Campus Reform inquired about the discriminatory enrollment criteria for the course—a clear violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits institutions receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin—the university quickly backtracked. The course description was changed (slightly) and now states that the class is “designed to enable Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color underrepresented in the sport of rock climbing to learn the sport and to feel included and supported.”

“The class is open to all Cornell students interested in learning rock climbing with this special focus,” the edited course description now states.

While students who do not fit into these minority categories are no longer strictly prohibited from enrolling, the intent to maintain a segregated racial environment in the class is abundantly clear.

Cornell Senior Director of Media Relations and News, John Carberry, claimed in a statement that “all Cornell students” are “welcome” to enroll in BIPOC rock climbing—a statement that is clearly in contradiction with the original course description.

“While the original description of the course represented an intentional focus on outreach and inclusion, there was never an intent to exclude non-minority students,” Carberry added, noting that “The description of the course has been adjusted accordingly.”

For deliberately encouraging unconstitutional segregation in official university programs, Cornell deserves its place on the list of America’s most racist universities.

Watch the video HERE. 

Sens. Sanders, Warren call for ‘restricting’ US aid to Israel at J Street confab: Jacob Magid

https://www.timesofisrael.com/sens-sanders-warren-call-for-restricting-us-aid-to-israel-at-j-street-confab/

Progressive lawmakers urge Israel to help vaccinate Palestinians, say foreign assistance shouldn’t be used to advance policies that ‘violate Palestinian rights’

Prominent progressive senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both used their Monday addresses at the J Street lobby’s national conference to call for regulating US aid to Israel, asserting that such assistance should not be allowed to bankroll Israeli policies in the West Bank that damage prospects for a two-state solution.

The stances appeared to mark a shift by more left-wing Democrats away from talk of “conditioning” aid to Israel to “restricting” it.

The former term was used by several candidates during the recent US presidential campaign, including Sanders and Warren — implying that some or all of the $3.8 billion in aid that the US has agreed to give Israel over a 10-year period should potentially be withheld based on actions taken by the Israeli government.

In shifting to talk of “restricting” aid, progressive Democrats, with J Street’s backing, are not calling to limit the amount of already-agreed-upon aid, but are rather seeking greater control of how it may and may not be used.

“If we’re serious about arresting settlement expansion and helping move the parties toward a two-state solution, then it would be irresponsible not to consider all of the tools we have at our disposal,” Warren told J Street in prerecorded remarks played on the second day of the left-wing, pro-Israel lobby’s virtual conference.

“One of those is restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories. By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course,” she added.

The Republican Jewish Committee lashed out at Warren’s remarks, calling them “disgusting.”

“To advocate, as Sen. Warren does, that the US pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians while the Palestinian Authority condemns Israel’s existence, incites violence against Israel and Jews everywhere, and continues its ‘Pay for Slay’ salaries to terrorists and their families, is disgusting,” said RJC executive director Matt Brooks.

For his part, Sanders also declared himself in favor of the US using its aid as leverage.

“I strongly believe that we must also be willing to bring real pressure to bear, including restricting US aid, in response to moves by either side that undermine the chances for peace,” he said.

“The truth is that the United States gives an enormous amount of military aid to Israel. It also provides some humanitarian and economic aid to the Palestinians. It is totally appropriate for the United States to say what that aid may and may not be used for,” Sanders argued.

HOLDING ON TO POWER: AFRICA’S LONGEST-SERVING LEADERS

https://ewn.co.za/2021/04/20/holding-on-to-power-africa-s-longest-serving-leaders

Here are some of Africa’s other longest-serving leaders, some of whom change the constitution, crush the opposition and use fear and violence to maintain their grip on power.

N’DJAMENA, Chad – After three decades in power, Chad’s President Idriss Deby died on Tuesday from wounds suffered on the battlefield, the army said in a shock announcement just a day after the 68-year-old was re-elected to a sixth term.

Here are some of Africa’s other longest-serving leaders, some of whom change the constitution, crush the opposition and use fear and violence to maintain their grip on power.

MORE THAN 30 YEARS

Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema is Africa’s longest-serving leader, still in power after 41 years. He deposed his uncle in a 1979 coup, and became “the country’s god” with “all power over men and things”, state radio said.

Obiang, the world’s most enduring non-royal head of state, was last re-elected in 2016.