RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/one-year-after-george-floyd-minneapolis

“There will never be cries to “say their names,” nor will enormous crowds of protesters ever demand “justice” on their behalf. Again, the unique political resonance of cop-on-civilian killing makes the outsized focus on those events understandable. But when you spend some time in the crime-surging Twin Cities looking into other victims of unjust violence, the disproportionality of the focus does make you think. ”

It would be foolish to deny that there’s a specific significance when citizens are unjustly killed by the police, as a jury in Minneapolis determined last week happened to George Floyd. Armed agents of the state funded by taxpayer money have special obligations, and that includes avoiding the unjust killing of citizens. When the killing is captured on video, an intense emotional reaction is doubly understandable.

But with the gigantic outpouring of global attention that the Floyd case received — and with virtually every major elite US institution united in both their condemnation of the death-inducing act, and their claimed resolve to continue doing unspecified reparative “work” — it would be foolish to not also notice the comparatively miniscule attention that other instances of unjust killings receive. If one unjust killing (Floyd) generates sustained, historic, society-altering attention, and hundreds or thousands of others generate virtually no attention, the reasons for that disproportionality have to reflect something about a society’s cultural and political priorities.

This is especially true in Minneapolis, where the tumult of the Floyd episode and its fallout has now lasted for nearly a full year. Because it simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.

“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)

The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree, as I can personally attest. See below.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_dark_night_of_fascism_has_finally_landed_in_the_united_states.html

Tom Wolfe famously quipped, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Certainly, that was the case during the Trump presidency, when leftists insisted he was Hitler, yet were unable to point to a single instance in which he’d engaged in conduct actually associated with fascists. However, in the topsy-turvy world that is 2021, Wolfe’s saying has been turned on its head. With the advent of the Biden administration, America is heading into a purely fascist future. Meanwhile, Europeans are insistently demanding freedom, whether it’s generals and other civil servants pushing back against Critical Race Theory and Islam, or ordinary people singing and dancing in the streets.

In America, people who committed a misdemeanor by entering the Capitol without permission are still rotting in jail in solitary confinement without ever having had a hearing. The situation is so dire and un-American that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, both proponents of total government, protested:

Most of the 300-plus people charged with participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been released while they await trial, but dozens of those deemed to be dangerous, flight risks or at high risk of obstructing justice were ordered held without bond. D.C. jail officials later determined that all Capitol detainees would be placed in so-called restrictive housing — a move billed as necessary to keep the defendants safe, as well as guards and other inmates. But that means 23-hour-a-day isolation for the accused, even before their trials begin.

And such treatment doesn’t sit well with Warren or Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), two of the chamber’s fiercest critics of solitary confinement.

“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren said in an interview. “And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/29/bidens-shameful-attack-on-our-democracy-rhetoric/

Joe Biden is either an historical illiterate or a shameless liar. Perhaps he is both.

Desperate to keep the disintegrating narrative about the events of January 6 alive, Biden, in his first sparsely attended speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, declared the January 6 protest was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Marked safe from Washington Post fact-checkers, Biden continued to lie. “As we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in our minds,” he lamented. “Lives were put at risk. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage was summoned. The insurrection was an existential crisis, a test of whether our democracy could survive. It did”

Of course it did. And no, lives weren’t lost. A single life was lost. Yes, many police officers acted courageously while many politicians scurried to hide under their desks. It wasn’t an existential crisis—no term in the vernacular of your average Democratic politician is more overused—or even a desecration. 

It certainly wasn’t an “attack on our democracy” in any manner. Excuse the language but only a complete moron—or your average MSNBC viewer, but I repeat myself—can possibly believe that comment to be true. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-presents-far-left-progressive-manifesto-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress on April 28th. Biden laid down his $6 trillion marker. Gargantuan, tax-and-spend government is back big time. Biden outlined plans for trillions of dollars of additional federal spending for massive government giveaways, on top of the $1.9 trillion for so-called coronavirus relief passed on a strict party line vote earlier this year. Biden was selling the American people a far left, progressive bill of goods wrapped in a moderate-looking package. He said that “America is on the move again.” If Biden gets his way in Congress with its very slim Democrat majority, America will be on the move towards a socialist-style nanny welfare state.

Fortunately, after a little over an hour of Biden’s laundry list of partisan programs that are music to leftists’ ears and his phony calls for bipartisanship, we heard the real deal from Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Senator Scott delivered a “common sense” vision of America in his rebuttal speech on behalf of the Republican Party.

“A president who promised to bring us together should not push agendas that tear us apart,” Senator Scott said. “Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you, the American people.”

On issue after issue, Senator Scott tore President Biden’s speech apart without having to literally rip up the written text, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi did last year with President Trump’s State of the Union address. Scott hit a grand slam, while Biden fouled out.

President Biden could have struck a truly unifying note by at least giving credit to former President Donald Trump for launching the coronavirus vaccine development and production program successfully in record time. But Biden was too petty to do that. Instead, he began his speech by taking all the credit for the vaccine roll-out. Then Biden proceeded to spread misinformation about his legislative agenda in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/senator-scotts-home-run/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

I’d recommend that everyone read Senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal to President Biden’s address last night. A few highlights below.

Is America still upwardly mobile? Senator Scott’s own journey is an argument in favor.

Growing up, I never dreamed I would be standing here tonight. When I was a kid, my parents divorced. My mother, my brother and I moved in with my grandparents. Three of us, sharing one bedroom. I was disillusioned and angry, and I nearly failed out of school. But I was blessed.

First, with a praying momma. And let me say this: To the single mothers out there, who are working their tails off, working hard, trying to make ends meet, wondering if it’s worth it? You can bet it is. God bless your amazing effort on the part of your kids.

I was also blessed by a Chick-fil-A operator, John Moniz. And finally, with a string of opportunities that are only possible here in America.

Senator Scott offered a powerful argument for expanding school choice based on the terrible and damaging decisions of so many public schools to keep their doors closed for far too long during the pandemic.

Most of all, I’m saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day. Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future. Our public schools should have reopened months ago. Other countries’ did. Private and religious schools did.

Science has shown for months that schools are safe. But too often, powerful grown-ups set science aside. And kids like me were left behind. The clearest case I’ve seen for school choice in our lifetime is because we know that education is the closest thing to magic in America.

And the senator offered a powerful critique of the president’s family policies, arguing that they are designed to support parents who want to use commercial childcare, and offer much less for families who have decided other arrangements are best.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/30/biden-deserves-zero-credit-for-booming-economy-covid-gains/

In his speech to Congress this week, President Joe Biden heartily patted himself on the back for everything good that is happening right now.

He described a country in crisis when he took office and said that “After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for a take off.”

The day after Biden’s speech, the Commerce Department reported GDP growth for the first three months of this year was 6.4%. New COVID cases are on the decline, and vaccines are plentiful.

So, it looks like Biden’s right, doesn’t it?

Except he doesn’t deserve any credit for any of those things.

Take the GDP number. Far from being in a Great Depression-scale crisis, the economy had been rapidly recovering from the government-mandated (and scientifically unjustified) lockdowns – with GDP leaping 33.4% in the third quarter of last year and another 4.3% in the fourth quarter.

When Biden took office, Q1 of this year was nearly a third over, and he didn’t sign his “American Rescue Plan” into law until mid-March, just two weeks before the quarter ended. So, even though checks started rolling out to people, that rescue plan was too late to have a significant impact on overall growth.

As a matter of fact, the GDPNow forecast for Q1 – which is a running estimate of the economy based on available data as they are released – was much higher before Biden signed his rescue plan than where it ended up. (See the chart below.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-post-pandemic-boom-11619736069?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden can hardly be blamed for trumpeting the U.S. economic resurgence in his address to Congress. But his claim that “America’s house was on fire” when he entered office? It was already extinguished, as Thursday’s first-quarter GDP report showed.

Real GDP rose 6.4% in the period as vaccines rolled out, state lockdowns eased and Americans spent December stimulus payments. Incredibly, real GDP was a mere 0.87% below the 2019 fourth-quarter business cycle peak and probably would have surpassed it if not for supply-chain problems and disincentives to work. Consumer spending contributed 7.02 percentage-points to growth—about 70% of that for goods, but spending on services also increased, especially on recreation, food and accommodation.

Housing chipped in 0.49 percentage-points as the surge in home building and renovations continued. Business investment added 1.29 percentage-points, mostly from software and IT equipment, despite a global semiconductor shortage and transportation bottlenecks that have snarled manufacturing. Net exports and reduced inventories subtracted 3.51 points.

What’s amazing is that U.S. output is nearly what it was in the fourth-quarter of 2019 even with payrolls being about 5% smaller. Businesses and workers have become more productive during the pandemic. Aggregate employee compensation is 2.9% higher than in 2019’s fourth quarter as businesses have increased pay to reward and attract workers. Total personal income in the first quarter was up a whopping 16.7% from the pre-Covid peak. Much of this is pent-up savings—the personal savings rate was a near record 21%—that will turn into more consumer spending as people resume travel and leisure activities.

Mr. Biden wants to take credit for rescuing an economy in flames, but Democrats in Washington have been dousing dead embers. The economy was poised to accelerate as vaccines rolled out no matter who was President.

https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/biden-erased-decades-of-historic?token=eyJ1c2

As President Biden wrapped up a 65-minute joint address to Congress to mark his administration’s first 100 days, what was shared in the lead-up to his speech sowed discord over the entire affair:

Jim Acosta
Biden to refer to Jan 6 insurrection as “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” in speech tonight.

Sure enough, the President delivered on this. Opening his address, Biden stated, “I took the oath of office — lifted my hand off our family Bible — and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Yes, the January 6th siege on the U.S. Capitol building, often alluded to as an “insurrection,” was an embarrassing day for our country. But to suggest that it was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” is disingenuous at best. At worst, it’s a malicious attempt to whitewash the history of attacks carried out both by and on the government that have had much more catastrophic results.

Apart from the September 11th terrorist attacks that targeted the country’s financial system, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the defenders of our democracy when a hijacked American Airlines flight 77 flew into the Pentagon. Were it not for the heroes who resisted against the hijackers of United flight 93, Al Qaeda’s attempt to fly a commercial airline into the White House or U.S. Capitol building would have come to fruition. Despite being a horrific tragedy, 9/11 has been dismissed by some as being explicitly a “foreign attack,” not one from within.

So, let’s explore attacks on our democracy from within.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-ugly-reaction-to-tim-scotts-speech-is-telling/

Tim Scott gave a competent Republican response to Joe Biden’s mendacious speech last night. And boy, the contrived, hyperbolic outrage and derision we saw from liberal talking heads was something to behold.

Some of it was just farcical. Take MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace’s contention that the speech, in which Scott praised the Trump administration vaccines, was “delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter.” Operation Warp Speed, she claimed, “didn’t do anything to get a needle in the arms, so a lot of disinformation.” Well, it did help boost the life-saving innovation that flows through those needles – not to mention a million needles into arms every day by the time Joe Biden got his shot.

But Scott’s most controversial statement, allegedly, was to contend that, “America is not a racist country.” All the usual suspects took to social media to mock the senator for simultaneously saying the nation wasn’t racist and pointing out that he had personally experienced bigotry. Of course America is a racist nation, they wailed, before getting “Uncle Tim” trending on Twitter to try and prove it. The Left’s demeaning of any African American who strays from leftist orthodoxy is one of the ugliest acceptable smears in our political discourse.

Scott’s two claims are wholly compatible. Bad actors and ugly ideas exist among people of all nations, and always will, and yet that does not necessarily mean the nation itself is fundamentally, legally, culturally, or systemically racist. We can always do better, but by world standards, the United States is likely the least racist place.