RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/we-have-a-freedom-problem

On Tuesday night, hundreds of New York City Police Department officers from specialized units rolled with quiet orderliness onto the campuses of Columbia University and City College. Within a few hours, they had arrested hundreds of students who had taken over campus property, barricaded buildings, destroyed furniture and windows, and allegedly even taken custodial staff hostage.

Social media soon flooded with videos capturing a rainbow coalition of twentysomethings in crop tops, piercings, and Kurt Cobain-era jeans, heads swaddled with Arab keffiyehs in solidarity with the fundamentalist Islamic forces that rule Palestinian Gaza. They shouted for violent uprising—“intifada!”—and then whined, went limp, and feigned unconsciousness as unflappable officers scooped them up, zip-tied their hands, and marched them into waiting police buses for arrest processing.

The NYPD operation, which occurred at the sundown conclusion of Passover, was uncomfortably resonant with the Jewish holiday’s central message: the great costs of freedom, and how easily we forget them.

The holiday enjoins participants not only to read aloud the story of the ancient Israelites’ miraculous exodus from Egyptian slavery, but to feel—personally­­—that they themselves had been in bondage and then freed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-happens-when-the-law-and-the-indictment-do-not-state-what-the-crime-is/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

I have a column up today on why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former president Donald Trump violates both the federal and state constitutions.

It offends the U.S. Constitution because the indictment pleads a crime (felony falsification of business records) that is different from the one Bragg is presenting to the jury (the “crime” of conspiracy to steal an election by violating federal campaign-finance statutes — a crime that does not exist in New York law). The prosecution flouts New York’s constitution because the felony business-records-falsification statute (§175.10) does not describe with specificity what is meant by “another crime” — i.e., assuming a person falsifies business records with a fraudulent intent to conceal “another crime,” the statute does not elaborate, by describing conduct or citing other statutory provisions, what these other crimes are that would trigger the felony penalty.

When it comes to due process, it is about as basic as it gets that, to be sufficient, penal statutes and indictments must put people on notice of, respectively, what conduct has been proscribed and what proscribed conduct has been charged.

When basic due process is denied, we get the confusing farce that is the ongoing trial. The newest actor in this romp is Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels, the two women who claim to have had sexual liaisons with Trump circa 2006 — i.e., a decade before he ran for president.

Here’s a dispatch from this morning by the New York Times’ Jonah Bromwich, who is reporting from inside the courthouse (the trial is not being televised, so we much rely on such reporting):

We are still looking at the texts between Dylan Howard, then the editor of The National Enquirer, and Keith Davidson. Davidson tells Howard that Karen McDougal’s story “should be told” and Howard responds “I agree.” The Enquirer, as the jurors already know, had no intention of telling the story — instead it sought to bury it. So not only does this evidence remind us of David Pecker’s testimony last week, it also helps prosecutors double down on the idea that The National Enquirer was involved in a secret plot to help Trump. It’s a reasonable explanation for why Howard was lying.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/02/stagflation-makes-its-appearance-on-bidens-70s-show/

Joe Biden got his start in politics in the 1970s and appears determined to recreate the world as it existed back then.

Misguided federal policies have pushed energy prices to punishingly high levels. Americans are struggling with inflation. Radical Muslims are holding American citizens hostage in the Middle East. Our adversaries, including Russia, are on the march. Even bell bottoms are making a comeback.

And, now, the pièce de résistance of the 1970s is also making a comeback: stagflation.

Stagflation. It’s a term that most young people and plenty of not-so-young people have probably never heard before because it’s been nearly 50 years since the U.S. suffered this leftist policy-induced madness. A combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation.

It’s something that liberal Keynesian economists say can’t happen. Inflation, they say, is caused by a too-hot economy and a tight labor market. A sluggish economy should push prices down.

And yet stagflation did happen then, and appears to happening again, thanks to massive spending and growth-choking taxes and regulations imposed by the Biden administration.

Last Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP growth in the first three months of the year was an anemic 1.6%, well below the consensus forecast. The next day, the “personal consumption expenditures” price index, a key policy barometer for the Federal Reserve Board, climbed 2.8%, higher than anticipated, marking the third-straight month in which prices went up faster than expected. In other words, inflation was accelerating during the same months the economy was flatlining.

https://tomklingenstein.com/this-regime-is-built-on-a-lie/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Scott Yenor examines the “mandatory ideology” of the emerging regime: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the all-consuming paradigm by which our schools and (in due course) our nation are being reoriented toward the principle of group outcome equality. This is the first in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

As red states burden and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices across the country, DEI operators broadcast defiance. “Under Siege,” reads one headline in the industry-standard Chronicle of Higher Education, “DEI Officers Strategize to Fight Back.” “Leaders Create Informal Support Network Amid DEI Opposition,” reads a headline in Insight into Diversity. Conferences are held to organize resistance. Even “College Presidents Are Quietly Organizing to Support DEI,” reads another Chronicle headline.  

An alleged moral necessity underlies this open political defiance. The current environment, it is assumed, is saturated with racism. It must be re-engineered with DEI policies: racial preferences in admissions and hiring, mandatory diversity training, a race-centered curriculum. Peace, harmony, achievement, and opportunity will then reign in workplaces and on campuses—after a generation or so of such policies. 

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-soros-helped-hamas-go-mainstream

The left-wing billionaire and his Open Society Foundations have poured untold millions into pro-Palestinian, anti-American groups. We’re seeing the results on college campuses across the country.

George Soros, who for decades has been funding progressive, neo-Marxist leftist groups, also poured money into groups and individuals that reject the existence of Israel. So, it is not surprising that his son, Alexander, who now runs the ironically named Open Society Foundations, is now funding, directly and indirectly, pro-Hamas demonstrations and Hamas-supporters’ encampments on university campuses across the United States.

The campus “occupations” are reminiscent of Kyiv’s Maidan Square encampment in the winter of 2004-2005, when Soros helped fund the Orange Revolution. He also supported the 2014 demonstrations of the Maidan Revolution, for which he was awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom by the Ukrainian president he helped elect, Petro Poroshenko.

Soros is the prime mover behind a decades-long effort culminating with a tsunami of anti-Semitic attacks on Israel and Jews everywhere.

When Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, took over Gaza in 2007, Soros criticized Israel for refusing “to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government.” He deliberately ignored the fact that the Islamist terrorist group’s explicit and well-advertised objective is the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel.

Soros has been funding, directly and indirectly — and apparently with the acquiescence of U.S. administrations — Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab leftist groups, as well as media outlets, that oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/05/01/make-government-work-n4928660

President Joe Biden says, “I know how to make government work!”You’d think he’d know. He’s worked in government for 51 years. But the truth is, no one can make government work. 

Biden hasn’t.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt …

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because “even the best person can’t implement change. … The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower.”

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-begins-entering-columbia-campus-moving-toward-barricaded-anti-israel-protesters/

Hundreds of New York City police officers equipped with riot gear took dozens of anti-Israel protesters into custody Tuesday evening after Columbia University called in the police to end the pro-Palestinian occupation of a campus building.

Columbia protesters occupied Hamilton Hall early Tuesday morning and blocked the entrances to claim the area as their own. Protesters were seen smashing windows and barricading themselves inside the building, one day after the university began suspending students for refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus.

The New York Police Department received a letter from Columbia president Minouche Shafik authorizing officers to move onto campus, marking the second time the university administration had done so. The NYPD closed off streets around Columbia while moving toward the barricaded campus location. Officers then entered Hamilton Hall through a second-floor window and began pulling people out of the building, according to Columbia radio station WKCR-FM.

Columbia’s property, including Hamilton Hall, was cleared of all pro-Palestinian protesters by around 11 p.m. Tuesday, less than two hours after the law-enforcement raid began.

Large numbers of protesters could be seen getting arrested, zip-tied, and escorted onto buses. Over 100 protesters were arrested at Columbia and the City College of New York, which saw a similar situation developing. Most of the arrests were made at Columbia, according to law enforcement.

The police department denied using tear gas when clashing with protesters; flash-bang grenades and other “distraction devices” were used instead, according to an NYPD spokesperson.

“The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing,” university spokesman Ben Chang said in a statement. “We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”

The building occupation was believed to have been led by people not affiliated with the university, Chang added.

In addition to clearing out all encampments, Shafik asked city police to maintain a presence on campus for at least two more weeks.

“In light of the activities that occurred after the events of April 17-18, 2024, we further request that you retain a presence on campus through at least May 17, 2024 to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished,” Shafik wrote in the letter to NYPD deputy commissioner Michael Gerber. The school’s commencement is scheduled for May 15