RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/

President Trump’s plan to distill the Republican platform to its essential principles may be opposed by some conservatives. By no means all of them, though. Count me as one former Republican county chairman and a member of a past platform committee who sees this plan as long overdue — potentially a new kind of contract with America.

The work on the platform for 2020 is reportedly being led by Jared Kushner. The idea is to shrink the party platform down to an index card, meaning to its pith — and, I’m predicting, in language that is so plain that no lipreading will be necessary. The points will be there in black and white so that everyone can quickly understand them and compare them to the Democrats’ nostrums.
What a difference that would be from the doorstops of recent history. The GOP platform has long been considered an unimportant document, a policy wish list rather than a political statement. This may be why so many people were shocked when President Trump started redeeming one campaign promise after another — from taxes to Jerusalem.
The roadmap for a condensed party platform is the one-page political document from the 1994 campaign, “A Contract With America.” Just six weeks before the congressional midterm elections, Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia, laid out an eight-point plan of what he would do as Speaker. It would go on to change history.

https://www.city-journal.org/toxic-narrative-about-police-is-wrong

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis—a death that appears, from all video evidence, to be a brutal and unjustified use of police force—rioters have set cities ablaze across the United States, looting businesses, destroying property, and attacking police. For many, this prolonged civil unrest is shocking. It shouldn’t be. Police have been the targets of a poisonous, decades-long campaign to paint law enforcement as a violent cog in the machine of a racially oppressive criminal-justice system. As more and more serious-minded people embraced this narrative and disregarded the astonishing progress made in racial tolerance, the question ceased to be whether America would see the large-scale riots of the kind that occurred in the mid- to late 1960s—when charges of widespread racism in policing had some merit—but only a question of when.

Many protest supporters have expressed frustration with the attention being given to a relative handful of agitators driving the violence and looting—behavior, they say, that distorts the image of what is largely a peaceful movement. Their frustration is understandable but also ironic: the narrative that has driven thousands into the streets is itself a distortion. Just as the violence that has alarmed the American public does not represent the peaceful protesters exercising their right to air their grievances, the police violence depicted in viral videos does not characterize the institution of law enforcement.

https://babylonbee.com/news/governor-cuomo-orders-nursing-homes-to-admit-rioters

ALBANY, NY—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered nursing homes to admit violent rioters and protesters throughout the state.

“If we are going to be compassionate, caring, and pro-science, we need to admit these oppressed individuals into every care facility available,” he said at a press conference this morning. “I don’t want to hear any talk of how this might hurt old people. This isn’t the Dark Ages — we listen to SCIENCE in this state!”

The order forced nursing homes to admit anyone carrying a brick, Molotov cocktail, baseball bat, or bike lock and house them until they recover. Scientists agree this is the best possible move and say that anyone who has concerns about how it might affect the elderly is an anti-science bigot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/britannias-riots-envy-katie-hopkins/

EXCERPTS

“Who could have believed a virus would cause politicians to lock down free people? How did the death of one black man in custody cause riots when ten were killed by their own hand in one weekend in Chicago? How is it possible for men to hate each other this much, to want to kill a stranger over a fight neither of them started? Where are all the powerful black voices who should be calling for calm?  Democrats keep pouring fuel on the fire even when their own house is ablaze. None of it makes any sense. ”

But as I watch events unfold across America, I feel strangely returned to that world again, halfway between conscious and not. Physically present but absented by other forces out of my control. Somehow I have woken up in a place where nothing makes sense and everything is warped beyond recognition. 

Like a dog, I can feel myself tilting my head at the screens in front of me, trying to make sense of the picture and noises coming out of them.

America is on fire. A small woman stands in her doorway trying to protect her stores, attacked by a mob wielding planks and stones. A man in white jeans is set on by looters who take running kicks at his head. A rock is flung with full force, a man’s life ended by a stranger who first set eyes on him just thirty seconds earlier. 

DC, NYC, Denver, Louisiana, Minneapolis, LA County, Atlanta, all fighting on the streets, fueled by the insanity of lives locked down, divided, unable to distinguish good from bad. It’s rather like a boiling ham frothing over with all the heat that’s been applied. If you could stop people to ask why they fight, why they threw that kick, that rock, looted this store, they would answer with a slogan or a name: George Floyd. 

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

mas·​quer·​ade | \ ˌma-skə-ˈrād  (Merriam-Webster)

Definition of masquerade

 (Entry 1 of 2)

1a: a social gathering of persons wearing masks and often fantastic costumes

b: a costume for wear at such a gathering

2: an action or appearance that is mere disguise or show

It would be appropriate to begin this column with how and why masked customers chased a maskless customer from a Shoprite storei in Staten Island.. NY. However, the masked customers do not own the store (unless they’re shareholders), and so had no right to “evict” the maskless customer by mob action or otherwise. That should have been the freedom of the proprietor to do business with the maskless customer or not. The incident was a min-prelude of the anarchic mob mentality chaos now ravaging the country.  But governor Andrew Cuomo has given “permission” to private businesses  to maskless people from entering their stores. “  “That store owner has a right to protect himself,” Cuomo said at his daily Coronavirus briefing. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store…”  But he has no rights, or otherwise. Rights? What are those? The concept is alien to Cuomo.

This is the same governor who ordered Covid-19 patients  be put into nursing homes which resulted in over 1,700 deaths. The state fudged the number of people who died from Covid-19 or from pre-conditions that had nothing to do with the virus. Exactly how many nursing home residents have died remains uncertain despite the state’s latest disclosure, as the list doesn’t nursing home residents who were transferred to hospitals before dying. The revised list shows that 22 nursing homes, largely in New York City and Long Island, have reported at least 40 deaths. Cuomo granted the nursing home executives immunity from the legal responsibility of causing patient deaths.

In the meantime, in San Francisco, which has joined the mask mania, passed a law that requires everyone to wear face masks when outside their homes, and especially in restaurants. And wherever else groups of people gather in small or large numbers .  This is not the San Francisco of Cyrus Skeen or Sam Spade..The San Francisco Chronicle published a guide for the simple-minded about the new distancing rules, comparing the social distance between people and a Muni bus, a cable car, sidewalk squares..

 One blog laughs at the purpose of healthy people wearing masks, to protect themselves when they are actually harming themselves by donning  masks ,  even while they’re driving behind a ton of glass and steel.

What is so obvious now are the totalitarian urges of so many state governors and municipal “authorities.”  The compulsion to render Americans  submissive,  helpless and  mentally “manageable” in a regulated society and in a statist political environment in which one’s actions and behavior are controlled by “authorities,” have bared the actions and policies motives and designs of the controllers. They want people to adopt and accept a lockstep mode of living.  They want everyone to  wear masks and look like they’ve been captured by alien invaders

NBC calls riots “protests.” Some on the left have argued that “rioting” is some kind of legitimate form of protest.”

One unintended consequence of universal lockdowns, “stay at home” mandates, and shutdowns is reported by Fox News is the rise in sexually transmitted diseases together with a rush on condoms in Canada. If and when the virus “crisis” has passes, there will be a new “baby boomer” generation come the end of 2020.

I end this column with a note of levity. After reading all of today’s news I had to grant myself a much needed chuckle.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-left-should-be-careful-with-its-riot-rhetoric/

“Justice excuses violence” is a self-destructive maxim that risks producing new atrocities.

Last week, the nation was stunned by the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle decried the slaying, and it didn’t take long for protestors across the country to take to the streets. Sadly, some recent anti-brutality protests have devolved into seemingly random displays of theft, property damage, arson, and assault. Yet through all this chaos and destruction, the Left has not found much to condemn with regard to the rioters. Indeed, left-wing intellectuals have tended either to explain away the crimes of violent protestors or to justify them as righteous and inevitable.

Before considering the implications of such rhetoric, some examples of its prevalence might be useful. On Saturday, Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher argued in Slate magazine that “the destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one . . . property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party and the Stonewall Riots.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist who recently received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project, tweeted out a more subtle endorsement of the riots: “I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for [black] Americans.” Perhaps Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has mustered the moral will to condemn the violence and destruction of the radical left? Quite the contrary — the furthest Biden has gone is to state that burning down communities is “needless” and unnecessary.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/dominating-the-streets/

Right now providing security must be a higher priority than law enforcement.

Since the revolution in policing that began in the early 1990s, we have had a generation of peace and prosperity. Without the rule of law — i.e., without order, without the presumption that the laws will be enforced — that kind of societal flourishing is not possible.

We are seeing now what happens when the rule of law breaks down. It is frightening, but it is hardly unprecedented, even in modern history. Bryan Burrough’s spellbinding history Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I reviewed for NR about five years ago, reminds us that in 1972 alone, there were 1,900 bombings in the United States, carried out, for the most part, by domestic terrorist groups and enraged individual American citizens. Regrettably, the radical “small-c communists” were not ultimately regarded as the sociopaths that they were. They eroded public support for our war effort in Vietnam, wrote the history in which they were lionized as social-justice icons against racist America, and triumphantly marched into academe, where they have taught and influenced the sociopaths who are making mayhem today.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.

https://www.steynonline.com/10312/the-case-of-the-topless-taioseach

Across the Irish Sea, the London press continues its frothing over lockdown breaches by Dominic Cummings. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s Boris Johnson’s Rasputin. I don’t know him, although a few years back I took his wife Mary (a great-granddaughter or some such of the fourth Earl Grey, Governor General of Canada) to a John McCain campaign event preceded by a burger at the Littleton Diner in New Hampshire. But her hubby’s rise to Fleet Street hate figure has largely passed me by: the media bigwigs regard Cummings as Boris’s brain, and loathe him for Brexit and for December’s Tory landslide. Then came the lockdown, and the perfect cudgel: a few weeks back, Mr and Mrs Cummings felt the Covid coming on and, concerned about who’d be around to care for the kid, decided to take their four-year-old autistic son to stay with his grandparents a hundred-and-thirty miles away.