RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Just this past week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Spoke outside the Supreme Court to protestors, while the Court was hearing a case that would require doctors in Louisiana who operate at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Senator Schumer, standing on the courthouse steps and speaking to protestors, called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name, threatening them: “ I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” When called out by others, including Chief Justice John Roberts, some Republican Senators and a few in the media, Senator Schumer claimed to regret his choice of words. Yet everything he says is predetermined and politically motivated. He is not stupid but has had no real-world experience. Since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1974, he has spent his entire career (forty-five years) in public service. He parses his words carefully.

This is not to absolve the Right, but vitriol among the sanctimonious left who feel a God-granted right to dictate to “deplorables” and others has become ubiquitous. Progressivism has become a religion in that it claims a moral code of wokeness, political correctness, identity politics, victimization and intolerance, the glue of shared values and mythologies. They clamor for diversity, as long as there is conformity in thought.

Nastiness and incivility have long been present on the political scene and always most venomous during political campaigns. There have always been fringe elements on both sides of the political divide who urge violence and recrimination against those with whom they disagree. However, incivility was generally limited to those on the political stage and to a few commentators whose bigotry is their success. Reporters and the general public were once more restrained in their observations. In our age of better educated citizens who have more free time to think about candidates and politics, unadulterated hatred should have given way to reflection and perspective. It hasn’t. Hatred, on the part of the left, has gone mainstream. Consider a few selections: White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky by the co-owner, because of her ties to the “inhumane and unethical” Trump Administration. Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was accosted in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and called a “real-life fascist.” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson was forced to leave another restaurant when fifteen protestors showed up shouting “Shame!” Such acts were encouraged by the establishment. In June 2018, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told attendees at an event to continue publicly harassing members of President Trump’s Cabinet.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

We’ve been here before, and the direst predictions have not come to pass

EXCERPT

When hysteria is rife, we might try some history. In 1997 we were told that bird flu could kill millions worldwide. Thankfully, it did not. In 1999 European Union scientists warned that BSE “could kill 500,000 people”. In total, 177 Britons died of vCJD. The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported by as having “a 25% chance of killings tens of millions” and being “worse than Aids”. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared “the first pandemic of the 21st century”, the scares in 2003, 2004 and 2005 having failed to meet their body counts.

Then, in 2009, pigs replaced birds. The BBC announced that swine flu “could really explode”. The chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, declared that “65,000 could die”. He spent £560m on a Tamiflu and Relenza stockpile, which soon deteriorated. The Council of Europe’s health committee chairman described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as “one of the great medical scandals of the century”. These scenarios could have all come to pass of course – but they represent the direr end of the scale of predictions. Should public life really be conducted on a worst-case basis?

Both Hancock and Britain’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, have struggled to contain the alarm. The government’s action plan pointed out that the virus is highly contagious, but the “great majority” of those who develop symptoms will experience only a “mild-to-moderate but self-limiting illness”. Every medical expert I have heard on the subject is reasonable and calm.

Not so politicians and the media. They love playing to the gallery, as they do after every health scare and terrorist incident. Front pages are outrageous. No BBC presenter seems able to avoid the subject. Wash hands to save the nation. The BBC must be sponsored by the soap industry.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-no-bail-fiasco-in-new-yorkthe-no-bail-fiasco-in-new-york-11583534248?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

You know New York has a problem when even Mayor Bill de Blasio admits it. On Thursday the New York Police Department held a press conference to report that major crime is up 22.5% this February over a year ago. Both the cops and the mayor attribute the spike to the bail reform pushed through the state Legislature in Albany last year, which is releasing people who have been arrested for one crime to go out and commit another.

“There’s a direct correlation to a change in the law, and we need to address it, and we will address it,” Mr. de Blasio said of the increase in crime. The mayor also said he was “absolutely confident” it will be addressed in Albany in the budget due April 1.

The Democratic Legislature, with the backing of both Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ended cash bail last year. The goal was to prevent cases such as that of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old charged with stealing a backpack. Because his family could not afford bail he spent three years in prison on Rikers Island—much of it in solitary—without being tried or convicted of a crime. After his release, he ultimately committed suicide.

The sensible part of bail reform was aimed at preventing injustices such as this one. The non-sensible part was to deprive judges of the discretion to keep behind bars criminals who remain a menace to the community.

https://www.city-journal.org/de-blasio-thrivenyc-mental-health-plan?utm_source=Bigger+Apple&utm_campaign=
DJ Jaffe is author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org. and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute.

Mayor de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray, who serves as his mental-wellness czar, just announced an additional goal for ThriveNYC, their signature $850 million, multiyear mental-health plan: “Reach People with the Highest Needs.” One might think that that priority would have been part of the original plan. In any case, it’s a hollow promise: a close reading of the 2020–2022 ThriveNYC spending plan and “Progress Report” makes it clear that the de Blasio administration will continue to send money to ineffective programs, while giving short shrift to programs that reduce homelessness, arrests, and incarceration of the seriously mentally ill. The mayor and his wife justify the continuing ThriveNYC boondoggle by reporting meaningless and misleading statistics.

Over the last four years, de Blasio and McCray regularly insisted that ThriveNYC was helping the seriously mentally ill. In 2019, McCray told an incredulous city council that 100 percent of ThriveNYC’s funds are used for the seriously ill. The real figure is well short of that mark. New York City Council Speaker Cory Johnson says that only 13 percent of the program’s funds go to the seriously mentally ill. Gary Belkin, the program’s first director, pegged the figure at 19 percent; Susan Herman, ThriveNYC’s current head, says that in 2022 it will go up to 26 percent. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/some_people_take_tranquilizers_for_anxiety_but_not_bill_clinton.html

In an upcoming Hulu production about Hillary, Bill Clinton reveals the reason he used the Oval Office for unseemly conduct with Monica Lewinsky.

Many of us vividly remember 1998, when Bill Clinton shook his finger at Americans while earnestly declaiming, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman” (commonly remembered as, “I did not have sex with that woman”). That statement was a lie. Although stopping short of actual sexual intercourse, Bill Clinton had all sorts of sexual relations with the much-younger Monica Lewinsky. It was inexcusably sordid and, worse, Clinton used the Oval Office for these escapades.

Twenty-two years later, Bill is finally explaining what drove him to defile the Oval Office in this way, and his explanation is a doozy: He was stressed.

Bill Clinton claims that his affair with Monica Lewinsky was one of the ‘things I did to manage my anxieties’. 

The former President suggests, in an explosive documentary seen by DailyMailTV,  that he had the fling with the ex-White House intern while he was in office because it helped with his own issues.

Bill reveals that at the time he met Lewinsky the pressure of the job made him feel like a boxer who had done 30 rounds and he looked at Lewinsky as ‘something that will take your mind off it for a while’.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/485687-chief-justice-john-roberts-heading-down-collision-course-with-himself

One of my favorite stories about Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is from one of his train trips to Washington. Holmes forgot his ticket but the train conductor reassured him, “Do not worry about your ticket. We all know who you are. When you get to your destination, you can find it and just mail it to us.” Holmes responded, “My dear man, the problem is not my ticket. The problem is, where am I going?”

Chief Justice John Roberts may have the same uncertainty this week as he finds himself on track to two decisions that will define him and the court. Once heralded as a reliable conservative, Roberts became the swing vote with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Now conservatives are unsure if Roberts will deliver or deflect a coup de grâce with decisions on ObamaCare and abortion. In both cases, he will grapple with his previous views that would push him to vote for decisions with sweeping impacts. For a chief justice who gets sticker shock at such moments, Roberts may find himself evading his prior self in shaping the future court.

Affordable Care Act

The Supreme Court earlier this week accepted an appeal from various states that are controlled by Democrats who seek the reversal of lower courts striking down the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act. In 2012, Roberts saved ObamaCare as the fifth vote in the case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Kathleen Sebelius. In my view, it was one of his weakest opinions as chief justice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/hendry-bruce-hendry/

I think it’s fair to say that America is the best place in the world for the average citizen to live and that it’s the best time in the history of the world to live in America as a black person, as a woman or as a homosexual.

In a religion there are shared values and shared mythologies. In a religion, if somebody challenges any of the orthodoxies they are attacked personally. Religions stay together because of these shared values and because, if you want to continue to be accepted by your group, you cannot challenge these shared values and mythologies. Progressives behave this way.

Religious people indoctrinate their children to believe in their orthodoxy, and we can easily observe that if you start the indoctrination early enough it will last a lifetime. Democrats have taken over our educational system from kindergarten to university and that kind of religious, socialist, indoctrination is going on, right now, in our schools.

Curiosity should be a community value but it is actually a community threat to those in power. Curious people who challenge religious ideas are not met with a kindly response but instead are met with an attack that is personal. By silencing those with different opinions, either by enforcing politically correct speech or verbally attacking the person that is trying to express a different opinion, you win the argument. This is basic strategy for Democrats. 

David Horowitz’s observation that progressivism is a religion explains a lot for me. Every society/culture in recorded history has had a religion. It’s the glue of shared values and shared mythologies that keeps the group together. Look at it this way. A religion needs three elements:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/progressive-big-lies-bruce-thornton/

The “big lie” was Adolf Hitler’s term in Mein Kampf  for the propaganda tactic of telling a lie so “colossal” that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Far from being specific to Nazism, this technique of political persuasion has been to varying degrees universal. These days, the masters of the “big lie” are the Leftists and those progressives who, addled by Trumpophobia, regularly promulgate whoppers that today’s internet can easily discredit.

Of course, from the Russian collusion fabrication to the Ukraine “quid pro quo,” the Dems have publicized numerous lies and distortions of facts. Now they’re at it again with hysterical attacks on Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. During the last debate, Mike Bloomberg charge that Trump “defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need,” a lie seconded by Joe Biden who added, “He cut the funding for the entire effort.” As the New York Post, commented, “It’s a lie that can only sow fear: The CDC budget is higher than when Trump took office. Same for the National Institutes of Health. And top career officials from both have been working with the White House for weeks to direct the US response.” This lie was so “colossal” that the AP––which was so skewed toward Democrats during Obama’s tenure that wags said AP stood for “administration’s press”–– ran a headline that read, “AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness.”

This penchant for accepting lies as truth, however, has warped the minds of Leftists both hard and soft ever since New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty lied about Stalin’s engineered famines in the 1930s. They have accepted the Marxist, as in Groucho, stance “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” One of the best examples is Bernie Sanders’ stubborn, unapologetic support for vicious totalitarian regimes like the Castro cartel in Cuba, based on a variation of the fascist excuse that Mussolini “made the trains run on time” combined with the old proverb favored by communists, and used in print by Duranty, that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/globalization-bleeding/#slide-1

When we become citizens of the world, that is, citizens of everyplace, then we end up citizens of utopia. That is, as citizens of οὐ τόπος — of “no place.”

The recurring dream — or nightmare — of being a ‘citizen of the world’

By the early 21st century, cosmopolitans were gushing that high-tech, instant communications, transnational agencies and agreements, free-flowing capital, international corporations, and a new eerily uniform global elite had, finally, made nationalism, borders, and even the nation-state itself all irrelevant. Nationalism was apparently relegated to dustbin of history, as we hit peak Socratic citizen-of-the-worldism.

There were always two flaws to these adolescent giddy reports from world-bestriding New York Times op-ed journalists about win-win globalization, with their praise of gleaming airports and superior high-speed rail in what was otherwise Communist China, or accounts of flying first-class on Qatar Airlines was heavenly compared with backward United or American Airlines.

Nothing New under the Sun
One, globalization was not the end of history. It is a recurrent, cyclical, and at best morally neutral phenomenon that has always, at least in relative terms, waxed and waned over the past 2,500 years of civilization — although recent transcontinentalism carries greater consequences in the era of electronic interconnectedness.

By a.d. 200, there was a globalized Roman world of 2 million square miles, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains. Like frogs around the pond of Mare Nostrum, all official business was conducted in Latin or, increasingly in the East, Greek. A Roman citizen could enjoy habeas corpus from Bithynia to the Atlantic. Thousands of small towns were marked by fora and agorae, colonnades, and basilicas. While multiracial and non-Italian, otherwise uniformly equipped and trained legions secured the vast borders. It was quite an achievement of providing aqueducts, security, and property rights to 70 million disparate peoples, but it was no longer really the earlier Roman Republic of the Scipios, either.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15020/imported-antisemitism-supporters

A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.

The 1988 Covenant (Mithaq) of Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends (and Israel’s enemies)… could not be more religious in nature…. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” Note that they say they are fighting “Jews”, not “Israelis”.

In the end, the only thing that can oppose it will be a renewal of a secular reform that once had a deep impact in many Muslim countries only to falter after the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. Without that, peace may never return to the Middle East.

On March 6, 2019, Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission launched a probe into claims that the country’s Labour Party, currently led by the lifelong Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, is “institutionally anti-Semitic”.

We are all too familiar with the development that the conflation of antisemitism and antizionism may be found today within politics.[1] Challenging this distortion remains a priority in Western countries. Fortunately, as recent events within Britain’s Labour Party have shown, many constituents are rejecting the overt antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism of the groups who have often underhandedly taken control of their party.[2]

It increasingly seems as if one source of antisemitism — as shown by more than one survey in Europe and in the United States — is that there often seems to be widespread antisemitism within Muslim communities (here, here and here).