RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/americans-must-criticize-our-corrupt-courts/

In the wake of his conviction in a New York court, President Trump has complained that the process was rigged against him, that the whole proceeding was a corrupt effort to persecute him with a view to influencing the 2024 presidential election. In response, many of his opponents have criticized him for undermining public confidence in our system of criminal justice and thus harming our democracy—a criticism that has been magnified by many in the media.

These critics, however, are missing the point and undermining a principle that is in fact essential to preserving our republic: namely, that criticism of the justice system when it errs or overreaches is necessary to preserving freedom under the rule of law.

Those who founded our nation were aware of this necessity.

Alexander Hamilton, representing the defendant in the famous libel case People v. Croswell, warned that “the most dangerous, the most sure, the most fatal of tyrannies” operated “by selecting and sacrificing single individuals, under the mask and forms of law, by dependent and partial tribunals.”

“Against such measures,” Hamilton continued, “we ought to keep a vigilant eye and take a manly stand. Whenever they arise, we ought to resist, and resist till we have hurled the demagogues and tyrants from their imagined thrones.” No sensible American would look back on these remarks and think that, by them, Hamilton was undermining democracy.

Hamilton’s great rival, Thomas Jefferson, acted on a similar view. As president, Jefferson pardoned publishers who had been convicted under the Sedition Act of 1798. Jefferson’s course of action here was inseparable from his belief that the Act was unconstitutional and that the courts of the United States had made themselves party to serious injustices by convicting defendants under it. Indeed, the pardoning power is included in the United States Constitution, and in many state constitutions, and is used routinely, precisely because prosecutors and courts can make mistakes and sometimes even willfully abuse their power over the lives and liberties of citizens.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/12/the-shady-stagnant-wealth-that-supports-hamas/

The tycoons funding the ferocious – and mostly artificially engineered – student demonstrations in support of the genocidal, Iranian-financed terrorist organization Hamas, and its goal of destroying the state of Israel, did not attain their money through any entrepreneurial excellence and innovation on their parts.

They are, rather, in one way or another, trust fund heirs – Leftist Lord Fauntleroys, if you will – or wheeler dealers of the commodities markets, cannibalizing on the misfortune of others around the globe rather than producing new products or services; or shifty hotel magnates with a lack of vision as stationary as their properties.

David Rockefeller Jr.’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund has bestowed nearly a half million dollars during the past five years to one of the organizers of the unlawful student demos at Columbia University and other campuses, the anti-Zionist Orwellian-named “Jewish Voice for Peace,” as well as providing grants to notorious left-wing donor George Soros’ Tides Foundation. Soros’ operations themselves help fund both Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, another organizer of the demonstrations.

The entrepreneurial genius of John D. Rockefeller — whose Standard Oil, originating with Rockefeller’s $4,000 investment, enabled America to grow to economic global superpower status — is long gone. He died 87 years ago, a quarter century after Standard was judged to have become a monopoly and forcibly broken into dozens of companies. Since then his descendants have used his wealth and name in great measure to fuel their political ambitions and impose their imprint on American culture under the guise of philanthropy.

In 1934, Rockefeller established trusts for his children consisting of oil stock and real estate; they would themselves establish trusts, which divide into new trusts for succeeding generations upon their deaths. Money managers keep the wealth from dissipating and the principal is kept out of the hands of the beneficiary descendants, who live off the interest. The sale of much of Rockefeller Center’s Midtown Manhattan buildings to Japanese interests in the latter half of the 1980s as property values boomed unlocked billions in cash for the family.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/11/the-unvarnished-truth-about-that-blockbuster-jobs-report/

Editor’s note: This has been revised and updated from an editorial that ran over the weekend.

President Joe Biden might think that last week’s jobs report shows that “the great American comeback continues.” Democrats might believe that “the numbers don’t lie – things are great,’ Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost put it. And leftist media mavens have no doubt convinced themselves that “the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.”

So why aren’t Americans themselves celebrating? Why is Biden’s claim that he created 15.6 million jobs — “more than any president in U.S. history” — that the unemployment rate is at historic lows, and that wages are rising, all falling on deaf ears? It’s a head-scratcher, right?

Well, not if you dig just a tiny bit deeper into the employment data, then you realize that all the hoopla about jobs under Biden is entirely statistical fiction, one happily repeated by Biden’s media vanguard.

Let’s break it down:

15.6 Million New Jobs? Not Even Close

Take Biden’s claim that 15.6 million more people have jobs. This is wildly misleading because the measure he’s using doesn’t count the number of people with jobs, it counts how many paying jobs there are.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-foundation-of-american-folly

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing.”

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics,” including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year—collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database—represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant—one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice,” as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing—and often outright revolutionary—causes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/rejecting_the_status_quo_is_the_only_way_to_survive.html

Can men give birth?  Do cow farts cause tornadoes?  Must “disinformation” tsars censor words to protect free speech?  Should Democrats jail opponents in order to save “democracy”?  If you listen to the propaganda press, these are some of the most important queries of our time.  It feels as if we’ve fallen down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole or entered the absurdist plot of a Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut novel.  How can we make sense of our increasingly senseless world?

America’s dean of word wizardry, Mark Twain, once quipped, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”  Boy, was he right!  For years we’ve been bouncing around in a pinball universe designed by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury.  When the government isn’t policing our language or arresting little old grandmothers for engaging in wrongthink, it’s busy helping Mexican drug-smugglers hook Americans on Chinese fentanyl and encouraging young boys to chop off their willies.  The Gestapo FBI spends most of its time hunting patriots as “domestic terrorists” and orchestrating elaborate entrapment schemes to justify bloated budgets.  The Josef Mengeles at the CDC work to create new diseases that will require experimental “cures.”  The Department of (in)Justice can’t stop locking up Americans for their political beliefs while lecturing the country about the importance of thwarting tyranny.  So much insanity now grips the United States that the great dystopian novels of the last century appear downright tame by comparison! 

The easiest way to navigate this Kafkaesque environment is to follow a simple rule: whatever the government says, believe the opposite.  Obama promised that socialized medicine would lower health care costs without benefiting illegal aliens; a decade and a half later, the only people who can afford Obamacare are the illegal aliens who get it for free!  Homeland (in)Security doofus Mayorkas still claims the U.S. border is secure, even as foreign terrorists and Chinese nationals flash middle fingers at television cameras documenting America’s invasion.  Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer passed an “Inflation Reduction Act” that has done nothing but exacerbate inflation.  Obama doesn’t care; the border has disappeared; and rampant inflation is the goal!  When everything our political leaders say is a lie and every policy betrays its purpose, Americans live in a Bizarro World where words mean nothing.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/10/the-left-knows-leftism-doesnt-work/

Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.

Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.

How do we know this? By a variety of barometers.

None of the major Biden “achievements”—10 million illegal aliens across a nonexistent border, key components of the cost of living 25-30 percent higher than in 2020, wars and chaos abroad, DEI racial and tribal obsessions, wars on fossil fuels—poll at even 40-45 percent. Biden’s own approval ratings, as the nominal architect of the most left-wing agenda since the Roosevelt administration, hover between 36 and 34 percent.

But most importantly, the left is not running on its record of the last three-and-a-half years but instead studiously ignoring it, at least temporarily through November. Suddenly, we aren’t hearing so much about cancelling pipelines and freezing federal oil leases, or so much demonization of the “greedy” oil companies. Instead, Biden is further draining the strategic petroleum reserve and begging OPEC in general and the no-longer-demonized Saudi Arabia in particular to pump oil as fast as possible.

We were lied to for nearly four years that the border was “secure,” as 10 million foreign nationals flooded across. Then we were told Biden was helpless to stop the deluge since he had no legal right to enforce federal immigration law through executive orders—a ridiculous excuse that even he would soon drop. Despite their eagerness for new constituencies, no one on the left dares to openly praise the influx of the last four years, much less demand more illegal immigration.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13509269/pro-Palestine-protest-White-House-chaos-smoke-bombs-maced.html

A huge pro-Palestine protest at the White House has descended into chaos with smoke bombs let off and attendees claiming they were maced. 

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington on Saturday calling for a ceasefire on Gaza.

Video shows smoke billowing in front of the White House as a speaker delivers a speech to a crowd calling Israel a ‘butcher of Gaza’.

Independent journalist Ford Fischer shared a photo of his bloodshot face claiming that mace had been deployed on the crowds during an attempted arrest.

In another clip cops can be seen making their way through the throngs to shouts of ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘f*** the police.’

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/09/260077/

I think that it was the great Miranda Devine, she of the “laptop from hell” fame, who first called the world’s attention to the latest wrinkle in the long-running “Get Trump” extravaganza in New York.  Anyway, I first heard about it from her post on X Friday. “If this is legit,” she wrote, commenting on a letter purportedly from Acting Justice Juan Merchan to Donald Trump’s Counsel and the Manhattan DA’s office,  “it should wipe out Trump’s conviction.”

Eh, what?

At issue was someone who (again, purportedly) posted on the Court’s public Facebook page a message from one “Michael Anderson,”  a self-described “professional shitposter,” who claimed to have inside information that Trump was about to be convicted. “My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted. Thank you folks for all your hard work!” The comment, Merchan wrote, was posted on May 29, a day before Trump’s guilty verdict rolled off the tongues of Merchan’s jury.

For a brief moment, the internet was ablaze with speculative comment, elated or anguished depending on the ideological coloration of the poster.  If it turned out that a juror had disobeyed his orders and spilled the beans about the verdict to someone who then posted the bulletin on Facebook, would that that constitute grounds for a mistrial?  After all, “prejudice to the defendant” is one of the four stipulated grounds for a mistrial. Chapter 15A-1061 of the statute says, in part, that “the judge must declare a mistrial upon the defendant’s motion if there occurs during the trial an error or legal defect in the proceedings, or conduct inside or outside the courtroom, resulting in substantial and irreparable prejudice to the defendant’s case.”

Is that what we have here?  It’s hard to say.  The original Facebook post was removed.  As far as I know, the juror in question has not been identified—and that’s assuming that a juror did inform “Michael Anderson” of the verdict. Did the post result in “substantial and irreparable prejudice to the defendant’s case?”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-6-the-record-is-not-good-for-perpetrators-of-politicized-criminal-proceedings

With the guilty verdicts in People v. Trump delivered by a Manhattan jury last week, the prosecutors are surely giving themselves a big pat on the back. We really got him this time! Undoubtedly they have convinced themselves that getting Trump branded a “convicted felon” (with little chance to get that reversed on appeal before the election, no matter how weak the conviction) will cause him to sink in the polls. At the very least, the successful prosecution of the main political adversary would have to be a positive for President Biden’s chances of re-election.

I wouldn’t be so sure. If you look into the history of efforts by a dominant political faction to use the criminal justice system as the means to disadvantage opponents, the record is not good for the perpetrators of these efforts. That is true even — maybe especially — where the politicized prosecution initially secured a criminal conviction.

I think it’s too early to expect day-by-day polling to tell us much about how these convictions might affect the upcoming presidential election in November. Instead, let’s look at some great politicized prosecutions of the past, and see how those worked out for the prosecutors.

For example, one of the most famous of this genre is the 1894 prosecution of Albert Dreyfus in France for allegedly giving military secrets to the Germans. Here is a summary of the affair from History.com. Dreyfus was a Captain in the French army. The military quickly tried Dreyfus in a court martial, convicted him, and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Two years later, a new head of army intelligence (Picquart) uncovered evidence that the traitor was another guy (Esterhazy); but instead of acknowledging the facts, the army transferred Picquart to North Africa, and then imprisoned him too. In 1898, Esterhazy was tried in his own court-martial, and acquitted. But then Emile Zola wrote the famous newspaper article “J’accuse” that accused the army of a massive cover-up. The whole scandal rocked France for a decade. Dreyfus was ultimately exonerated, and restored to his position in the army, where he served out his career. If you know anything about the Dreyfus affair today, it is as a famous example of official corruption and anti-semitism.