RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-biden-administration-in-landmark-social-media-censorship-case/?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration in a landmark case dealing with government involvement in social-media censorship, finding that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.

Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion asserting that two states and five social-media users do not have standing to contest the level of coordination between government agencies, nonprofits, and tech platforms in restricting content on social media.

“We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute,” the majority opinion reads.

The landmark Murthy v. Missouri content-moderation case came about from a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration over federal agencies working with social-media platforms and third-party nonprofits to censor conservatives online.

Last July, a district court ruled that federal agencies could not communicate with social-media companies or nonprofits with the purpose of coercing them into restricting speech. The Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction last fall and found multiple federal agencies violated the First Amendment.

“This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence,” Barrett said of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/

There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.

A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.

Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?

An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.

When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/reparations-taking-money-from-people-who-never-owned-slaves-and-giving-it-to-people-who-never-were-slaves/

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/27/nobel-economists-who-got-bidenflation-100-wrong-now-predict-trump-will-ignite-inflation/

Reprinted, with permission, from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity‘s daily must-read Hotline email.

We have our hand on the Bible swearing we are not making this story up.

A gang of 16 Nobel prize-winning economists signed a letter yesterday endorsing Joe Biden for president because: “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite inflation with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

But then our colleague, Scott Bessent, noticed something strange and ironic about the signatories: 13 of these economists signed a highly-publicized open letter three years ago assuring Americans that Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending spree would “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”

Then — whoops! — 18 months later inflation soared to 9.1% under Biden – the worst U.S. inflation in almost 40 years! This would be the medical equivalent of amputating the wrong leg. 

Here’s the overlapping list of these economists who were spectacularly wrong in 2021, but whom we are supposed to believe are right this time around.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/cultural-marxism-a-century-old-and-thriving/

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals. Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

Also, according to an analysis from OpenTheBooks.com, the University of North Carolina spends an estimated $90 million each year on 686 employees who promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in their departments or across the system. But change is on the horizon. In a repudiation of DEI ideology, the UNC Board of Governors voted on May 23 to repeal its diversity policy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-are-we-shocked-by-dems-cruelty-to-joe-biden/
Why, then, would we be surprised that so many Dems are willing to globally humiliate a senile old man?

A subgenre of Republican commentary this election is the scolding of Democrats, establishment media, White House staffers, and Jill Biden for their callous cruelty in exposing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline before millions of people. As a New York Post editorial wrote, “Whatever it [the reason] is, to any outsider it looks downright cruel to keep trotting Biden around under the pretense that he can possibly serve four more years in the world’s most grueling job. . . . How much longer must we bear this grim charade?”

All are obvious and valid points. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Since the Democrat Party sold its liberal-democratic birthright to the Left for a mess of electoral pottage, all the inhumane dysfunctions of the “woke” Left have now become institutionalized features of the Democrat Party.

Exhibit No. 1: the Left’s amoral precept “by any means necessary” now permeates Democrat policies and electoral practices, and has led a substantial number of party members, including Biden’s advisors and campaign staff, to endorse ––with public enthusiasm and moral preening––the unholy alliance of “woke” Leftism with antisemitism; implied, or even direct approval of the Holocaust; and solidarity with the genocidal, sadistic butchers of Hamas.

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next

The fragile facade of transgender ideology has cracked over the past year. Whistleblowers from within the medical profession have emerged to provide damning evidence that doctors are performing procedures based on shoddy scientific evidence under the label of “gender-affirming care,” as outlined in the WPATH Files and the Cass Review. Former patients who received “gender-affirming” care as adolescents have now detransitioned and are suing the doctors who cut off their breasts and put them on hormones that permanently damaged their bodies. Businesses ranging from Target to NFL teams are scaling back or eliminating Pride-themed merchandise and promotions. The public, too, is increasingly turning against transgender ideology. The tide is shifting.

The Left has adopted a new approach in response: political persecution of those speaking out against trans dogma. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) who exposed the hospital’s secret continued use of irreversible sex-change procedures on minors after having publicly stated that it had stopped. By indicting Haim, the DOJ is seeking to silence future whistleblowers and to signal its disregard for the mounting evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, and often irreversible.

Haim had anonymously sent City Journal’s Christopher Rufo documents proving that doctors at TCH were still prescribing hormone replacement therapy drugs and implanting puberty blockers in minor-age patients more than a year after the hospital announced it had stopped its pediatric gender-affirming care program. A month after Rufo published his article in May 2023, federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services knocked on Haim’s door to let him know that he was a “potential target” in an investigation of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This week, an unsealed indictment revealed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is charging Haim with four felony counts of violating HIPAA. A press release on the indictment alleges that Haim accessed patient information “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/trumps-conviction-is-doubly-abusive/

Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed in New York state court the so-called hush money case against Donald J. Trump. In brief, Trump was found “guilty” of making a $130,000 payment in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race—via his former lawyer Michael Cohen (who himself pleaded guilty in 2018 to what the judge overseeing his case described as a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct”)—to buy the silence of porn actress “Stormy Daniels,” who claimed that she and Trump had sex, all in an effort to interfere in the election, according to the prosecution.

For those who are understandably confused about the exact nature of Trump’s wrongdoing given that, in civil litigation, settlements paired with nondisclosure agreements are quite common, the supposed illegality is that when Cohen was reimbursed, the payments were recorded as legal expenses, which prosecutors contended was an unlawful attempt to mask the true purpose of the Trump-Daniels transaction—to influence the 2016 election.

In any event, on Thursday, May 30, 2024, a mere five months from the 2024 election, a jury, after a little more than nine hours of deliberations, found Trump guilty of every single one of the 34 charges DA Bragg brought against him. Consequently, the Associated Press reports that Trump “became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes.” As Kenin M. Spivak has noted in The American Mind, the proceedings are riddled with more than a dozen reversible errors. Nonetheless, Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11, by the judge who oversaw the trial, Juan Merchan—just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Of note with respect to Judge Merchan’s rather dubious impartiality, his daughter, Loren Merchan, is the president of Authentic Campaigns—a group that represents Democrat politicians and political action committees and which has collected at least $70 million in payments from Democrat candidates and causes since she helped found the company in 2018.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/24/swifties-need-to-grow

EXCERPTS

Taylor Swift was in London last week, and it felt like a collective mania had briefly taken hold of the capital.

As Swift’s seemingly never-ending Eras tour was in town, you could hardly move for millennial women wearing cowboy hats and glitter. But it wasn’t just hardcore Swifties who were in the grip of Taylor-mania. Transport for London released a special Swift-themed Tube map to mark her presence, with lines renamed after her albums, stations renamed after her songs and the map’s colours jazzed up with sequins. On Friday, the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace was performed to the tune of Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’. Walls across the city were decked in Taylor Swift murals.

When you think of a ‘Swiftie’, you’re probably imagining a teenage girl – or a thirtysomething professional who thinks she’s a teenage girl. But some of the guests at the London concerts over the weekend were a long way out from even those demographics.

Prince William, the heir apparent to the British throne, posed for a selfie with Swift before attending the concert for his 42nd birthday. Although he did have his two older children, Charlotte and George, in tow, his vigorous, frenetic dancing to ‘Shake it Off’ made it all too clear that he was the biggest Swift superfan of the bunch.

Even Keir Starmer was out among the Swifties. The Labour leader posted a snap of him and his wife, Victoria, at the concert on X, noting that he was making a ‘“Swift” campaign pitstop’, to groans all round.

What is going on here? Why are fully grown, adult politicians fawning over a star who makes pop music for teenagers? Or at least, in any sane era, should be making pop music mainly for teenagers. It surely can’t be down to her underwhelming lyrics. After all, this is the musical genius whose latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, contains such lyrical masterpieces as: ‘We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists’; ‘You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate’; and ‘Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto’.