RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=d08064d2fc

You are undoubtedly familiar with many efforts of the fascist left to use its control of government offices, bureaucracies, and other institutions to delegitimize and silence mainstream conservative speech: things like the Censorship Industrial Complex, otherwise known as pressure by government functionaries to induce social media platforms to shut down wrong think on topics ranging from Covid to climate change to Trump; de-monetization of perfectly reasonable sites like PJ Media or Watts Up With That; the political prosecutions of presumptive Republican nominee Trump, including locking him in a courtroom to prevent him from campaigning; and many more such.

This week along comes a new and quite extreme instance that you may have missed. A European group called the National Conservatives scheduled a two-day conference for Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels. The signature issue of the National Conservative movement is immigration, which they want to restrict; but beyond that their Conference appeared to feature a wide range of voices from Europe’s right, including some prominent elected officials. Examples of speakers were Nigel Farage of the UK (one of the leaders of the Brexit movement, and now leading a political party in the UK called the Reform Party, that looks likely to win significant seats when the next election is held); Suella Braverman, a Conservative MP in the UK, and recently, if briefly, the Home Secretary (which is one of the top cabinet positions); Eric Zemmour of France, head of a political party called “Reconquête!”, and winner of about 7% of the votes in the last presidential election; and Viktor Orban, current (and since 2010) Prime Minister of Hungary.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/inflation-hits-the-drive-through

You don’t need to be a close follower of economic data to know that food has gotten more expensive. The sticker shock at the grocery store and the anecdotes on social media reflect the truth: food prices at groceries and restaurants have increased by more than 25 percent in the last four years. That’s more than overall inflation (about 20 percent) and slightly more than average wage growth (about 24 percent). The Wall Street Journal recently reported on USDA data showing that Americans are now devoting more than 11.3 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest percentage in 30 years. While other food-spending measurements show a slightly smaller rise than the USDA’s, Americans are certainly spending more on food than they were immediately before the pandemic.

The data contain one puzzle, though: Americans don’t seem to be cutting back on dining out. Eating at restaurants is rightly considered something of a luxury; the more frugal way to consume food, generally, is to prepare it yourself. As the USDA shows, Americans are spending less of their income on groceries today than they were 30 years ago, even with recent food-price increases. At restaurants, however, Americans on average are spending quite a bit more of their income than they were three decades ago—well over 5 percent today versus about 4 percent in the early 1990s.

To understand this development, some historical perspective is useful. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditures Survey tracks household spending on goods and services back to 1901. Over the course of the twentieth century, BLS reports that households cut the portion of their income spent on food from over 40 percent to about 10 percent. That remarkable change left Americans with much more money to spend on other things, both luxuries and necessities.

The BLS lumps together grocery and restaurant spending for most of its past data but separates the two from 1984 onward. The more recent data also allow us to focus on specific demographics, such as middle-class families (the middle 20 percent of earners in this dataset). In the mid-1980s, middle-class Americans spent about 7 percent of their gross income on food at restaurants, and about 10 percent on groceries. By the late 2010s, these numbers had fallen to about 5 percent on restaurants and 7.5 percent on groceries, similar to the numbers from 2022 (4.6 percent on restaurants and 8.4 percent on groceries).

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-arrests-more-than-100-protesters-including-ilhan-omars-daughter-at-anti-israel-protest-on-columbia-campus/

New York City police arrested 108 anti-Israel protesters on Columbia University’s campus on Thursday after the university’s president asked law enforcement to step in and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

NYPD officers in riot gear arrived on campus Thursday afternoon, more than 30 hours after the protest began, and warned protesters to disperse several times before they began making arrests for trespassing. Two protesters were charged with obstruction of governmental administration in addition to trespassing, city officials said at a news conference.

“These arrests were made without incident, and we will now let the rest of the criminal-justice system run its course,” police commissioner Edward Caban said during a news conference on Thursday evening.

Isra Hirsi, the daughter of progressive representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), was among the protesters who were arrested.

Mayor Eric Adams said police “ensured that there was no violence or injuries during the disturbance.”

“Columbia University students have a proud history of protest and raising their voices,” Adams said during the news conference. “Students have a right to free speech — they do not have a right to violate university policies and disrupt learning on campus.”

Asked why the Columbia sit-in was not considered a peaceful protest, Adams said “a peaceful protest is not in violation of city laws” or on public property.

“I know the conflict in the Middle East has left many of us grieving and angry,” he added. “This is a painful moment for our city, for our country, and for the globe. New Yorkers have every right to express their sorrow, but that heartbreak does not give you the right to harass others, to spread hate.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-legal-arsenal-of-the-group-quota-regime/

Editor’s Note: Lawfare, the weaponization of law against political opponents—both public figures and ordinary citizens—is now a mainstay of the Left’s political strategy. T.J. Harker, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, explains how the law itself has become the power mechanism of the present revolutionary threat, and illuminates how fully this new order has already supplanted the old American Constitution. From woke prosecutors to political disbarments to judicial activism, the group quota regime and the legal apparatus are now indistinguishable in large swathes of the country.

This essay was originally published in The American Mind under the title “The Regime v. America.” In the weeks since its release, at the end of a lengthy and expensive trial, a California Bar Court officially recommended that John Eastman be disbarred.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public. 

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests. 

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.” 

https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/us-news/bill-maher-says-the-us-has-passed-the-rubicon-slams-dearborn-michigan-death-to-america-rally/

“Real Time” host Bill Maher said it’s time to draw the line when it comes to chants of “Death to America” on American soil.

On Friday’s “Overtime” segment on YouTube, Maher addressed the protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, who shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during an International Al-Quds Day rally earlier this month.

“Can I talk about American propaganda? Because there was a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, it’s a large Muslim population, [there were] chants of ‘Death to America.’ I feel like we’ve passed something here,” Maher said.

“The left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam. I try not to do it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I’ve made my point. But it needs to be talked about now. When you start chanting ‘Death to America’ in America.”

In a conversation with guests Piers Morgan and British journalist Gillian Tett, Maher pointed to quotes from anti-Israel activist Takek Bazzi, who headlined the hour-long rally in front of the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.

In video shared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Bazzi tells the crowd at the event that the “Death to America” chants were in honor of former Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/throw-the-anti-american-left-under-the-bus/

You’re likely to hear a lot about the polls showing that Americans are growing impatient with Israel. Democrats and their media allies seem to have concluded that this sentiment will grow along a straight-line trajectory until a majority have become intractably hostile toward Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. But straight-line trajectories are inherently fallacious. They take no account of exogenous events, such as, for example, Iran’s brazen, multilayered missile and drone attack on Israeli population centers. Indeed, even before that attack, Democratic and media elites had already internalized a misreading of this war and voters’ perceptions of it.

For example, a Pew Research Center poll from late March showed that, while the public is growing weary of watching Israel zealously prosecute its right to self-defense, those same voters also understand that Israel’s casus belli is just while Hamas’s is not. That survey found that only 15 percent of respondents believe that Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are “not at all” or “not too” valid. By contrast, 49 percent of respondents don’t believe that Hamas’s aims or cause are valid. Although 34 percent said Israel’s conduct on the ground in Gaza is “completely” or “somewhat” unacceptable, the October 7 massacre that begat this war was seen as an “acceptable” response to Israel’s actions by precisely 4 percent of American adults. Nearly three-quarters of the Americans surveyed rejected the notion that the barbarity unleashed on 10/7 was a legitimate response to the conditions that prevailed in the Gaza Strip.

This dichotomy is something on which America’s center-left elites should reflect amid their ongoing efforts to coddle and mollify what can only be described as a pro-terrorism constituency.

bit.ly/445DATx
1. Passover (April 22-30, 2024) is a Jewish national liberation holiday, highlighting the Exodus, the Parting of the Sea, the Ten Commandments, the 40-year-wandering in the desert, and the reentry to the Land of Israel 3,600 years ago.

2. The Abolitionist and human rights movements were spurred by the Passover Exodus. For example,  in 1850, Harriet Tubman, who was one of the leaders of the “Underground Railroad” – an Exodus of Afro-American slaves to freedom – was known as “Mama Moses.” Moreover, on December 11, 1964, upon accepting the Nobel Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, ‘Let my people go!’” Furthermore, Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong leveraged the liberty theme of Passover through the lyrics: “When Israel was in Egypt’s land, let my people go! Oppressed so hard they could not stand, let my people go! Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell old Pharaoh to let my people go….!” 

3. The US Founding Fathers were inspired by the Exodus, in particular, and the Mosaic legacy, in general, shaping the Federalist system, including the concepts of (anti-monarchy) limited government, separation of powers among three co-equal branches of government, featuring Congress, as the most powerful legislature in the world. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – “the cement of the 1776 Revolution” – referred to King George III as “the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England.” And, the Early Pilgrims considered their 10-week-sail in the Atlantic ocean as “the modern day Parting of the Sea,” and their destination as “the modern day Promised Land” and “the New Israel.”  

4. The US Founding Fathers deemed it appropriate to engrave the essence of the Biblical role model of liberty (the Passover-related Jubilee) on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof (Leviticus, 25:10).”    The Jubilee is commemorated every 50 years, and the Liberty Bell was installed in 1751 upon the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges.  

Moreover, there are 50 States in the United States, whose Hebrew name is “The States of the Covenant” (Artzot Habreet -ארצות הברית ). Also, the Exodus is mentioned 50 times in the Five Books of Moses; Moses received (on Mount Sinai) the Torah – which includes 50 gates of wisdom – 50 days following the Exodus, as celebrated by the Shavou’ot/Pentecost Holiday, 50 days following Passover.

5. According to Heinrich Heine, the 19th century German poet, “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”  

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/18/joe-bidens-economic-dunkirk/

Just after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in November 1980, economic adviser David Stockman wrote a memo warning the president-elect that he faced an “economic Dunkirk” thanks to the disastrous economy he was inheriting.

Among Stockman’s warnings was that the Carter administration had set a “ticking regulatory time bomb” that would blow up the economy.

“They have spent the past four years ‘tooling up’ for implementation through a mind-boggling outpouring of rulemakings, interpretative guidelines, and major litigation – all heavily biased toward maximization of regulatory scope and burden,” Stockman wrote.

Stockman – who would later serve as head of the Office of Management and Budget and ended up losing Reagan’s trust – had that part wrong. While Carter was a disaster as president, at least he showed an ability to learn on the job. And so late in his term, Carter embarked on a deregulatory campaign to fight inflation. Among other things, he freed the trucking and airline industries from onerous government mandates.

“Carter gave Reagan the phenomenal gift of deregulation. Combined with the (Reagan) tax cuts that largely took effect in 1983, the economy went on a growth tear,” wrote Brian Domitrovic, a scholar at the Laffer Center, in Forbes. “All the capital that Reagan freed up via his tax cuts found room to roam in the deregulated world which Carter had set up.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/marjorie-taylor-green-idiot-wreck-gop

It’s high time someone in the Republican Party told Marjorie Taylor Greene to turn all that bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy on Democrats, and stop trying to defeat her own party. 

The Georgia Republican, who famously displayed sexually explicit photos of Hunter Biden  during a committee hearing and called fellow representative Lauren Boebert a bitch on the House floor, is known for wild antics and equally harebrained conspiracy theories.   

Currently, she is threatening to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Louisiana Representative, with a five-vote majority in the House, is attempting to keep his caucus intact as he navigates treacherous issues including funding Ukraine, which has become unpopular with some conservatives, and reauthorizing the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He also struggled to pass a funding bill, which required relying on Democrats to get another big spending package over the threshold. 

To be sure, not all Republicans approve of spending billions more to arm Ukraine, especially since our own border remains wide open; many in the GOP wanted Johnson to demand border enforcement in exchange for support of Kyiv. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (which is perhaps why Hunter Biden was so richly employed there) and it not clear that America’s billions sent to fight Vladimir Putin have all been spent towards that end. There is almost certainly inadequate oversight, as I wrote early in the war. 

Nonetheless, countering Russia’s power-mad dictator is the right thing to do