RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-have-they-done/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

The only thing reassuring about the Colorado supreme court’s 4–3 decision disqualifying Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential ballots is the horror it inspired. Trump fans, Trump critics, and Trump adversaries alike recoiled. Even if they didn’t look askance at the dubious legal rationale that prevailed in this court, the assault it represents on the civic compact proved too much for even some of Trump’s most indefatigable opponents to defend.

That’s a modest silver lining. It will prove no comfort as the decision’s political reverberations unfold. The sense that unelected functionaries and professional bureaucrats have dedicated themselves to the effort to steal from Republicans their agency by simply ruling Trump out of the political process isn’t exclusive only to the MAGA movement’s true believers. GOP voters across the Republican spectrum increasingly believe that, to one extent or another. They will expound on that concern to anyone willing to listen. Anyone would rebel against such an imperious intervention into affairs as intimate as their vote. Americans, in particular, are disinclined to just sit back and take that sort of peremptory imposition.

Even if this sentiment was just a heuristic that folks who don’t spend their free time reading charging documents used to navigate the criminal allegations against Trump, it’s an understandable (if wrong) cognitive shortcut. When it comes to the Colorado case, however, the allegation is well-founded. The logic to which Minnesota’s supreme court appealed when it rejected a similar effort to bar Trump from the ballot, citing the 14th Amendment’s restrictions on candidates who “engaged in” insurrection, is unassailable.

https://www.thefp.com/p/colorado-court-trump-2024-peter-meijer-democracy?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For years, we’ve been told that Donald Trump is a worse-than-Hitler threat to democracy and that those who opposed him—leading Democrats, the courts, Noam Chomsky, Michael Avenatti, Rachel Maddow, the hosts of The View, even old Twitter—were just trying to protect it. It’s odd then to now be told that the best way to save democracy is by banning Trump from the ballot.

That’s what happened in Colorado yesterday, when the state’s Supreme Court ruled in a 4–3 decision that former president Donald Trump—currently the most popular presidential candidate—was disqualified from appearing on Colorado ballots for the 2024 presidential election. 

The decision—perhaps the most extra-constitutional act by a high court in my lifetime—is astonishing on every level. 

First, the reasoning:

The Colorado court did it by reinvigorating Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads in part that “no person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Those words were written in 1866, less than a year after the Civil War ended, a war in which over 300,000 Union soldiers died to keep America united, in order to bar many former Confederate officials from serving in government.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lincoln-memorial-steps-vandalized-with-free-gaza-graffiti-red-paint/ar-AA1lNZIn

“National Park Service conservators have begun the process of removing the paint this morning, though it may take multiple treatments over several days to remove all of it,” Park Police added. “The steps on the west side of the Reflecting Pool are closed to visitors while the conservation work takes place.” 

It is not immediately clear who was behind the incident.

Dozens of anti-Israel protesters were arrested on Tuesday after staging an illegal rally inside the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., an act led by activist Linda Sarsour, according to reports. 

Last Monday, a protest calling for a cease-fire led to over 40 arrests at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Fox5 DC reported. 

The pro-Palestinian protesters were illegally demonstrating inside the Congressional space, according to authorities. 

Just after 10 a.m., a Capitol spokesperson told Fox 5 that the demonstrators arrived, with one man even climbing a statue in the atrium, before being charged with resisting arrest. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-ebonics-movement-and-the-elimination-of-whiteness/

The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression.

Few in academia, or in mainstream society for that matter, took the Ebonics movement very seriously. Everyone knew that if any Black person wanted—at minimum—a job as a hotel receptionist, a customer service agent in a call center, or a clerk in a retail store, he or she would need to speak standard English. The latter was the lingua franca of business and commerce, and that was not about to change. If Blacks aspired to achieve economic parity with their compatriots, then they would have to become bilingual.

Lately, the Back to Ebonics movement has morphed into a devoutly nasty and pernicious new form. It has transmogrified into a hegemonic call to replace standard English as the norm. It regards requiring Black students to use standard English as anti-Black linguistic racism. Blacks required to speak standard English are believed to experience violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization. The leader of this movement, a Black professor at the University of Michigan by the name of April Baker-Bell, has sponsored a document to abolish what she calls “White Mainstream English.” She believes that Black students who are forced to write their papers in mainstream English are victims of Anti-Black Racism.