RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-10-do-additional-gun-control-laws-have-much-potential-to-rediuce-gun-crime

“Adding more and more restrictions on gun ownership is the way people who think the world can be perfected by more restrictions on freedom pursue their fantasy. The Second Amendment represents an alternative vision of how to live in an imperfect and unperfectible world.”

May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.

But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

The two cited events seem, at first glance, to provide at least some support for the proposition that additional statutes could have some effect. The reason is that in both the Buffalo and Uvalde cases the gunmen had acquired their weapons legally. Buffalo (from CNN, May 18):

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/09/justice-department-colludes-with-congress-to-bolster-the-insurrection-narrative/

This week produced yet another example of the shameless collaboration between the U.S. Department of Justice, the Democratic Party, and the national news media to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him. The ink was barely dry on the not guilty verdict for Michael Sussmann, just one of many figures who acted as a pass-through between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the FBI to manufacture the Russia collusion hoax, before the same players were up to their old tricks.

Members of the January 6 select committee blanketed the Sunday news programs last weekend promising bombshell revelations would shake the nation during a primetime hearing Thursday night. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told CBS News’ Robert Costa the committee would present findings to show an “extremely broad . . . extremely well-organized” conspiracy to overthrow the government that day. What the committee uncovered related to the alleged conspiracy, Cheney warned, is “really chilling.’

Roughly 24 hours after Cheney’s interview aired, Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling the January 6 criminal prosecution, announced seditious conspiracy charges against five members of the Proud Boys, the so-called militia group involved in the Capitol protest. The new indictment, handed down by a D.C. grand jury 13 months after its initial indictments in the case, made instant headlines.

But the 32-page indictment contained no new information aside from a few irrelevant details; much of it rehashed previous filings in the case. Nonetheless, Graves claimed the men conspired to “oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force, by opposing the authority of the Government of the United States and by preventing, hindering, or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of powerful,” referring to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freakout-nation/

America is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

Between the psychological damage caused by government-imposed lockdowns, the stress of an economy flirting with recession, and our increasingly acrimonious domestic politics—amplified by the social media panopticon—there is ample cause to question the state of the American psyche. In the past, our political and cultural leaders would call for toughness and stoicism in the face of adversity. Today, however, our ruling class dismisses and condemns these virtues as “toxic masculinity,” extolling, instead, displays of victimization and vulnerability.

Modern America is becoming increasingly defined by a burgeoning victimhood culture. Even athletes, once models of perseverance and resolve, are now celebrated for bowing out and choking under pressure. The champion in this event is Naomi Osaka, whose every unraveling is lauded by reporters as a bold act bringing attention to the issue of mental health in sports. A healthy society would have scorned Osaka into re-conformity with the expectations associated with her ostensible status as a world-class athlete and, in doing so, would have benefited both her and society itself.

The importance of stable cultural expectations and norms and their correlation to individual mental well-being is attested by Philip Rieff in his 1966 classic of sociology, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff distinguishes between the kinds of social “commitment therapies” that had been the norm in all traditional cultures and the individualized “analytical therapy” that is dominant today. Rieff sees cultures, at least traditional cultures, as systems for helping the individual cope with nature and society. Such cultures commanded us to suppress certain behaviors that might otherwise have been natural and instinctive, and they did so for the sake of integrating us as fully as possible into a social world:

All such systems of therapeutic control, limiting as they do the area of spontaneity, are anti-instinctual; what we mean, ordinarily, by cultures, are just these systems. We call these systems “therapeutic” because these controls are intended to preserve a certain established level of adequacy in the social functioning of the individual, as well as forestall the danger of his psychological collapse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/bidens-who-takeover-matthew-vadum/

The Biden administration’s bid to surrender American control over public health emergencies in the United States to the World Health Organization fell short at the UN’s 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva last month, but there is no reason to believe Biden won’t try again.

This drive is part of our illegitimate placeholder president’s effort to undo all the good things that former President Donald Trump accomplished. Trump slashed U.S. funding of WHO and served notice the country would pull out of the Communist Chinese-influenced agency, but Joe Biden aims to super-charge WHO’s authority in world affairs by amending an international pandemic treaty known as the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005.

Of course, WHO is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a purveyor of leftist horror propaganda that, like its parent, the United Nations, should not exist.

WHO demanded the catastrophic lockdowns, getting creative and using them to push the pseudoscience of manmade global warming. “Countries must set ambitious national climate commitments if they are to sustain a healthy and green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” WHO said in October 2021, claiming that “air pollution, primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, which also drives climate change, causes 13 deaths per minute worldwide.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/kavanaugh-assassination-plot-leftist-inside-job-daniel-greenfield/

After police arrested a California leftist on a mission to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh, the Biden administration finally condemned the campaign to intimidate the Supreme Court.

“As the president has consistently made clear, public officials, including judges, must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety or that of their families,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely claimed.

After leftist activists had posted a map of the homes of Supreme Court justices to harass them, Jen Psaki had retorted. “I don’t have an official U.S. government position on where people protest.”

There is in fact such a position and it’s illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 1507 which states that anyone with “the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness” “pickets or parades in or near a building….  or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Biden just decided not to enforce these laws in order to allow his leftist allies to intimidate the justices.

Not one of the leftists who have spent years harassing Supreme Court justices with protests outside the court and even their homes has been sent off to prison. Nor will they. Pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court, marching around the homes of justices, and trying to prevent them from coming to court have become basic parts of the activist playbook.

Even after the Kavanaugh assassination plot, leftists are continuing to protest outside his home.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/protesters-descend-on-amy-coney-barretts-home-one-day-after-kavanaugh-assassination-plot/

Protesters gathered on Thursday evening outside Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, where she lives with her husband and seven children, according to reports.

The protests, as reported by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, come one day after a California man allegedly attempted to assassinate Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Early Wednesday morning, police detained 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske after he exited a taxi in front of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland wearing black clothes, according to a criminal complaint. The man told authorities he called 911 because he was having suicidal thoughts. He told a dispatcher he had come “from California to kill a specific” Supreme Court justice, the affidavit said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/the-lefts-political-violence-problem/

Progressives have a long history of applauding violence when it’s aimed at their ideological opponents.

You’ll be happy to know that the New York Times did get around to covering Wednesday’s attempted murder of a United States Supreme Court justice. All you need to do is pick up the paper.

Well, no, no, it’s not front-page material — except for a teeny, tiny blurb under the vacuous heading “Arrest Near Home of Justice,” right under such feature page-one stories as “Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women” and “Back to the Office” Does ‘Never’ Work for You?”

Can’t really blame them though, right? I mean, today’s huge story — the only story really — is “INSIDE AN ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY.” Remember Thursday is Insurrection™ Day! Or, I should say, Insurrection™ Night — as in this evening’s prime-time Dem-dominated January 6 committee TV extravaganza, produced, at the behest of Nancy Pelosi’s House, by a bigwig former ABC executive.

Maybe the assassination story got a mention on page 2? Nope, sorry about that, not page 2 . . .  or 3 . . . or 10 . . . or even 15. No, you’ll need to dig all the way down to page A-20 to find the Gray Lady’s grudging coverage of how “Man With Pistol, Crowbar And Zip Ties Is Arrested Near Kavanaugh’s Home.”

Do you think the Left might just have a political-violence problem?

Well, imagine what the coverage would be if, say, we switched out the word Kavanaugh and substituted Sotomayor. Think we’re still talking page A20? Of course not. It would be the only story — a story permitted to eclipse even Insurrection™.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/10/the-democrats-insurrection-against-the-supreme-court/

It’s bad enough that someone in America could become so unhinged by nonstop far-left media propaganda that he’d try to kill a Supreme Court justice. But far worse is the blasé reaction by the Democratic Party and its extreme-left pro-abortion allies to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Following his arrest in the early hours Wednesday, Nicholas John Roske told federal law enforcement officials that he intended to kill Kavanaugh. He was, he said, angry that the Supreme Court might soon overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision — which, by the way, would only mean that states, not the federal government, would determine abortion laws.

Roske meant business. He was toting a bag that, as the arrest record noted, contained a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape, and other items, which he hoped to use to kill Kavanaugh.

Just another deranged lunatic? A one-off by a lone nut? Hardly. It seems the Democrats’ increasingly violent rhetoric in recent years continues to bear its poison fruit.

A mere day before Roske was nabbed, pro-abortion activists firebombed a pro-life CompassCare pregnancy center outside Buffalo, in what the Washington Free Beacon described as “the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/09/5-questions-that-must-answered-before-the-j6-committee-begins-its-theatrical-production/

Don’t expect answers from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Committee weaponized to operate as a political witch hunt.

he House Committee on Jan. 6 will launch its dramatic summer hearings tonight in a prime time show trial produced by a former ABC News executive as desperate Democrats aim to shift the narrative ahead of the midterms.

The nine members of the Select Committee appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will introduce the panel’s findings and question a pair of witnesses while presenting graphic footage of the riot to a nationwide audience. Every cable network, except Fox News, will broadcast the proceedings in an arrangement sought by the partisan probe to elevate the evening’s drama shining light on a three-hour riot that happened more than 18 months ago.

Absent from the panel asking questions, however, will be any Republicans appointed by GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy after Pelosi took the self-proclaimed “unprecedented” step of barring Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, from the probe. Instead, Pelosi hand-picked the most vocal pair of NeverTrump House members to serve in their place, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who serves as vice chair and was disowned by her own party.