RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_season_of_life.html

As the Christian world celebrates Resurrection Sunday, the Northern Hemisphere is springing with new life.  Buds on trees are visible, and baby animals are moving around for the first time.  It is a season of rejuvenation.  These sights are pleasing reminders that physical death is insignificant next to the prospect of everlasting spiritual life.

Farmers are counting down the days until the final frost and the opportunity to plant new crops in warming soil.  Growing food teaches that, as in our individual lives, timing is often critical.  If you plant corn too early, seedlings will die; if you plant too late, an early autumn frost can kill the crop.  Sweet corn needs both a lot of sun and sufficient moisture.  Heavy rains can drown young plants before they have time to strengthen their roots.  When stalks are growing tall in harsh summer heat, though, a good rain can make the difference between a bountiful harvest and a desiccated field.  A gentle breeze is helpful for pollination; strong winds, however, might break stalks in half.  Seeds should be sown close to each other but never too close — or you’ll end up with tiny ears!  Sweet corn plants grow well together, but they also need their space to produce delicious, milky kernels.

Think about those lessons in the context of human life.  Sometimes we need temperate weather to survive; at other times, we need intense heat, wind, or rain to grow as individuals.  We must learn to endure harsh conditions.  Sometimes we must even seek out dangerous storms.  If a young child is made to suffer too early or for too long, the damage can cut short an otherwise healthy life.  If a young adult suffers too little, however, then he may never grow strong enough or wise enough to truly live.  To find joy, we must experience disappointment.  To be whole, we need other people.  To be our best, though, we need the space to become the people we are meant to be.  As on a farm, sometimes violent storms weaken us; sometimes they make us remarkably resilient.  Such is life.  Timing is everything.  

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/31/easter-reflections-george-washingtons-farewell-address-in-todays-america/

Sitting down the day before Easter, I thought I might say something about this most awful (in the old sense) holiday in the Christian calendar.  But then Joseph R. Biden, the President of the United States, issued an official proclamation denominating March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility. Farewell Easter! You just got superseded by the latest freak show in the great Democratic carnival of perversity. 

I can’t compete with Transgender Day of Visibility.  Nor can I compete with “Lizzo,” the kinky, obese black singer who performed for Joe Biden’s “grassroots” fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall last week.  That event, which featured three presidents—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden—pulled in some $26 million for Biden’s 2024 presidential coffers. Tickets to the event topped out at $500,000 a pop. How’s that for a “grassroots” extravaganza?  That same day, Donald Trump went to the wake for Jonathan Diller, the New York City cop who was gunned down in cold blood by Guy Rivera, a black ex-con who had 21 prior arrests. He also made a donation to a charitable organization to pay off the house mortgage for Diller’s widow. 

I feel stymied by these contrasts, so I thought I would reprise, with some updates, a column featuring George Washington that I wrote for a prior Easter. 

I recently chanced across a photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline at night from Good Friday in April 1956. Three skyscrapers dominating the space feature certain windows illuminated to form gigantic crosses to commemorate that most solemn of Christian holidays. The year 1956 was not that long ago. But how much has changed in those 60-odd years! Can you imagine such a public display of Christian affirmation in New York today? Nor can I.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/29/remembering-a-great-senator-who-put-his-nation-ahead-of-politics/

I was greatly saddened this week when I heard the news that former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman had passed away due to complications from a fall. Although I disagreed with him on some domestic political issues, there was no daylight between us on national security.

Senator Lieberman was a patriotic American and a good family man. He was also a man of principle who always put protecting the security of the United States and standing firmly with the State of Israel ahead of partisan politics. Senator Lieberman also worked closely with many Republican senators, especially the late John McCain and Lindsey Graham, on national security matters.

As much as we want to keep politics out of commemorations of the senator’s life and accomplishments, it is impossible to avoid drawing comparisons between him and leading Democratic officeholders of today who have not followed in his footsteps of putting U.S. national security ahead of U.S. politics.

The most dramatic example of this occurred earlier this month, when, in a speech from the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in Israel. Schumer also echoed criticism by the Biden Administration on how the Netanyahu government has conducted the war against Hamas and for its opposition to a two-state solution peace plan, which Schumer said will make Israel a “pariah.”

There was a time when such over-the-top criticism of a U.S. ally and overt meddling in the politics of a friendly state would attract strong bipartisan criticism. Unfortunately, we live in a different era when Democratic politicians march in lockstep and will do anything to hold onto power. In the case of President Biden and Senator Schumer, this means ignoring America’s historic and crucial friendship with Israel to throw it and Prime Minister Netanyahu under the bus because the Israel-Hamas War is so unpopular with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing that it is hurting Biden’s reelection chances.

So it wasn’t a surprise that the only major Democrat to speak out against Schumer’s shocking criticism of Netanyahu was Senator Lieberman, who wrote a scathing op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 20 titled “Schumer Has Crossed a Red Line over Israel.” In his op-ed, Lieberman said, “while Mr. Schumer’s statement undoubtedly pleased American critics of Israel, for the Israelis it was meaningless, gratuitous, and offensive.” Lieberman also lamented that Democrats used to be the more pro-Israel party, but now Republicans are. A partisan divide, he said, is not good for Israel, which needs broad bipartisan support from the United States, and also undermines America’s need for strong alliances.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/25/rcps_samizdat_prize_matt_taibbi_jay_bhattacharya_and_miranda_devine_resisting_censorship.html

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.

The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.

Miranda Devine said if her story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had been able to spread widely before the 2020 election, the outcome might have been different:

MIRANDA DEVINE: At the New York Post, we had a little fraction of the truth, which was that [President Biden] was involved in this corrupt, influence-peddling operation with his family. We had a glimpse of that through Hunter Biden’s laptop. We published it, and I think if the story had not been censored by social media, Big Tech, the FBI pre-bunking our story, and the CIA’s 51 intelligence officials, we now know including serving CIA officers, had not lied about the story and said it was Russian disinformation, I think the outcome of the election might have been quite different.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, he thought the world had gone crazy:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: I thought the world had gone crazy. I understood why a lot of people were scared — there’s a new disease floating around. But I’m an epidemiologist, I do public health policy. It was just a strange thing that I happened to be in the right place at the right time, so I did what I’ve always done and wrote scientific papers. What stunned me was the reaction to those papers by my colleagues and my university. It was a corruption of the basic scientific process. Attacking someone who is saying what the data shows.

It snowballed, it felt very lonely at the beginning, but people started to speak up at great personal cost. And I wondered the whole time, why it required any great personal cost at all. It’s a scientific question, it’s a policy question, we need a society where that kind of discussion doesn’t require courage… It shouldn’t be that when you have an emergency, that is when free speech is the most dangerous. You shouldn’t have some guru tell you what to do. It is exactly when there is an emergency that free speech is the most needed.

Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in “The Twitter Files.”

MATT TAIBBI: It was a lot like the journalistic version of the golden ticket in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” to look through the secret files of one of the world’s biggest corporations.

The first thing we were looking for actually had to do with Miranda’s story, and I thought because of a couple of interviews involving Mark Zuckerberg we would maybe find a few emails from the FBI about that one story. We knew that had been suppressed, and ironically we didn’t find a whole lot about Miranda’s story, but we did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, “Flagged by FBI,” “Flagged by DHS,” “Flagged by HHS,” “Flagged By Treasury.” We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.

There’s a journalist here who writes for RealClear, Aaron Maté, where the FBI basically passed a request from the Ukrainian Secret Service to take this guy off Twitter. It was a whole long list of spreadsheets full of requests about all these different journalists, and the scale of it was mind-boggling. That is what unites all three of us, we were all caught up in this story of mass censorship that until very recently was hidden. This has to be out in the open more, people need to know more about it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-brutal-murder-of-new-york-city-cop-jonathan-diller/

NYPD officer Jonathan Diller was savagely murdered on Monday by a career criminal who was out on the street, with his career-criminal cohort, despite their combined 35 arrests.

Officer Diller was 31. He leaves behind his wife Stephanie and their one-year-old son.

A little before 6 p.m., Diller and his partner approached a Kia Soul that was illegally parked in front of a T-Mobile store near a bus stop in Far Rockaway. The car appears to have been parked there for about ten minutes, according to the New York Post’s sources, one of whom has seen police video.

Lindy Jones (a.k.a. “Killa”), 41, was behind the wheel. Guy Rivera was sitting in the passenger seat. It’s not certain what they were up to, but we can infer it wasn’t good. Rivera, who shot and killed Diller, also had a shiv hidden in his butt. And there turned out to be a second gun in the car. Police suspect the two sociopaths were planning a robbery.

Diller approached the passenger side of the car; his partner the driver side. Diller instructed the car’s occupants to roll down the windows. They refused. Rivera then ignored Diller’s direction that he remove his hands from the pocket of his sweatshirt. Finally, Jones unlocked the automatic door locks, but when Diller tried to open the passenger door, Rivera pulled back from the inside handle.

Diller again told Rivera to remove his hand from his sweatshirt pocket. It was then that Rivera fired his gun and shot the officer — one shot that pierced Diller’s abdomen under the bulletproof vest he was wearing.

Diller’s partner returned fire, wounding Rivera. He has been treated and will recover.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/murder-of-officer-diller-a-wake-up-call-for-nyc

New York City was shaken Monday by the shooting death of NYPD officer Jonathan Diller, 31, during a car stop in Far Rockaway, Queens. Diller reportedly sensed something was off about the Kia illegally parked, blocking a bus stop, and approached. After Diller repeatedly asked Guy Rivera, 34, to step out of the passenger seat, Rivera shot the officer through the door, fatally hitting him below his bulletproof vest.

Known as a selfless, already-decorated public servant, Diller lived on Long Island with his young bride and one-year-old son. His cold-blooded murder resonated with New Yorkers’ growing personal fears of crime and lawlessness. In a recent Citizens Budget Commission poll, barely a third of New Yorkers report happiness with their neighborhood’s safety. Less than half feel even somewhat secure riding the subway during the day, down from over 80 percent across recent decades; at night, that figure drops to 22 percent. And no wonder: Monday’s 6 p.m. gunfire sent those at the nearby Rockaway–Mott Avenue station scattering in terror.

The nightmare of such violence and of Officer Diller’s death should be understood as a referendum on New York’s current elected leadership, which takes every opportunity to undercut basic solutions to danger. Despite overwhelming evidence that police, prosecution, and incarceration are how cities keep citizens safe, New York’s clueless progressive leaders continue to demand laws barring these tools, advocating instead for magically curing crime’s “root causes.”

This hubristic approach was epitomized at last week’s city council hearings by New York City Public Advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams. After helpfully invoking “peace and blessings,” Williams insisted that crime is just a misperception, and that, since New York State enacted bail reform in 2019, “recidivism rates are pretty similar and some points have even gone down.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/potemkin-feminism/

Remember Christine Blasey-Ford? She is the psychologist whom former California Senator Dianne Feinstein discovered and groomed to be a hostile witness in the 2018 Supreme Court hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Her appearance was carefully timed for the end of the hearings for more impact. But her story describing Kavanagh’s alleged sexual assault of her at a high school party decades earlier was full holes and lacked credible evidence.

Now, just in time for the November election, she’s on a book-tour, garnering screen-time and specious praise for her “bravery.” So far, all the tour has accomplished is to publicize one of her own witnesses, Mark Judge, who she claimed was also at the party. But Judge told Fox News that he wasn’t there. And at the time of the hearings, in a letter to Senators he also said, “I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”

These tactics, replete with hoaxes lacking confirmable empirical evidence, are sadly all too familiar. For example, in 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team, three of whom were charged by an incompetent or unscrupulous District Attorney with kidnapping, rape, and first-degree sexual offenses against an exotic dancer. Many corporate media outlets rushed to judgement, wielding stale politically correct clichés that libeled the team––“The Real Face of Duke University,” “Spoiled Sports,” “Jocks and Prejudice,” “Wolves in Blazers and Khakis,” and “Will Duke Take a Look at Itself?” are a few.

By the way, does anyone believe that in this age of radical “woke” prosecutors, those Duke students would have been exculpated because the state bar filed ethics charges against the District Attorney for “withholding exculpatory evidence and making inflammatory statements about the case”?

These politically weaponized tactics have sprung from the hijacking of feminism that was obvious in the Nineties. A movement that had begun in order to ensure the integrity of women’s Constitutional rights, has now become a political weapon for pushing progressivism’s technocratic ambitions for expanding the reach and power both of the government, and of the factions sharing that aim to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/no-one-is-above-the-law-that-means-a-trump-doj-must-indict-joe-biden/

Let’s apply the new Trump standard.

Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.

As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.

If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.

The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?

After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.

After getting her fraud judgment against Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James said, “No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.”

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.