RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theblaze.com/news/black-lives-matter-demands-trump

https://blacklivesmatter.com/blm-demands/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=417c881ae

BLM’s 7 Demands
1. Convict and ban Trump from future political office:

We are joining Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and others who are demanding Trump be immediately convicted in the United States Senate. Trump must also be banned from holding elected office in the future. Call your members of Congress and demand they support conviction by dialing (202) 224-3121.

2. Expel Republican members of Congress who attempted to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist attack:

More than half the Republican representatives and multiple senators stoked Trump’s conspiracy theories and encouraged the white supremacists to take action to overturn the election. We are supporting Rep. Cori Bush’s resolution to expel them from Congress for their dangerous and traitorous actions. We also support steps to bar them from seeking another office.

3. Launch a full investigation into the ties between white supremacy and the Capitol Police, law enforcement, and the military:

The Capitol was able to be breached and overrun by white supremacists attempting to disrupt a political process that is fundamental to our democracy. We know that police departments have been a safe haven for white supremacists to hide malintent behind a badge, because the badge was created for that purpose. We also know off-duty cops and military were among the mob at the Capitol on January 6th. Guilty parties need to be held accountable and fired. We are supporting Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s COUP Act to investigate these connections.

4. Permanently ban Trump from all digital media platforms:

Trump has always used his digital media platforms recklessly and irresponsibly to spread lies and disinformation. Now it is clearer than ever that his digital media is also used to incite violence and promote its continuation. He must be stopped from encouraging his mob and further endangering our communities, even after inauguration.

5. Defund the police:

The police that met our BLM protestors this summer with assault rifles, teargas, and military-grade protective gear were the same police that, on Wednesday, met white supremacists with patience and the benefit of the doubt, going so far as to pose for selfies with rioters. The contrast was jarring, but not for Black people. We have always known who the police truly protect and serve. D.C. has the most police per capita in the country; more funding is not the solution.

6. Don’t let the coup be used as an excuse to crack down on our movement:

In response to the coup, Politicians have already introduced the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021. We’ve seen this playbook before. These laws are used to target Black and brown communities for heightened surveillance. Republicans are already busy trying to create an equivalence between the mob on January 6th and our Freedom Summer. We don’t need new domestic terror laws, facial recognition, or any other new police power for the state. Our government should protect righteous protest and stay focused on the real issue: rooting out white supremacy. There are enough laws, resources, and intelligence, but they were not used to stop the coup. Our elected officials must uncover why.

7. Pass the BREATHE Act:

The police were born out of slave patrols. We cannot reform an institution built upon white supremacy. We need a new, radical approach to public safety and community investment. President Biden has already drawn on the BREATHE Act in his executive actions calling for racial equity screens in federal programs, investing in environmental justice at historic levels, and engaging with system-impacted communities. The BREATHE Act paints a vision of a world where Black lives matter through investments in housing, education, health, and environmental justice.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/facebook-trump-board-lifetime-ban-jonathan-turley

The decision of the Facebook board to uphold the decision to ban former President Donald Trump but reconsider his lifetime ban may seem transparently convenient for many. However, there is precedent. 

One of my favorite trial accounts is from Ireland, where an Englishman accused an Irishman of stealing a pair of boots. The guilt of the defendant was absolutely clear but the Irish jury could not get itself to rule for the Englishman. Instead, it acquitted the Irishman but added a line, “We do believe O’Brien should give the Englishman back his boots.” Case closed.

Few people thought that, after expanding the censorship of political figures like Trump for years, Facebook could ever summon the courage to declare itself wrong in the ban first imposed on Jan. 7, 2021. Instead, the board ruled that it was absolutely right to suspend Trump but it may want to reconsider the permanent ban given the absence of any objective standard to support it. So Trump will still get the boot for now.

It may be too harsh to expect anything more from a board that literally monitors one of the world’s largest censorship programs. 

Facebook, Twitter and other companies now openly engage in what they like to euphemistically call “content modification.” The decision reflects the convoluted logic of censor’s free speech review board. The company – and the board – start from the assumption that it can and should censor views deemed “misinformation” or dangerous. The starting position therefore is that censorship is justified and that content neutrality is dangerous.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/as-things-fall-apart-people-seem-to-lack-all-conviction_3801729.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=RCP

The American poet Delmore Schwartz (1913–1968) had a number of good one-liners.

His mot about existentialism, for example, is hard to beat: “Existentialism,” he said, “means no one else can take a bath for you.”

Given the level of pretension that surrounded the French-German import, and given its dour currency in the academic stock market at the time, that deflationary observation was just the thing.

Schwartz’s comment seized upon something essential in that school of philosophy—its radical individualism—and then gave it a comic twist. Not the Heideggerian “Dasein,” whose essence is “being-unto-death,” but a nice warm bath that is yours and yours alone. It was nicely done.

Another comment by Schwartz has special relevance to our own situation. I mean his observation that “Even paranoids have enemies.”

I reckon that Rudy Giuliani can savor the truth of that apothegm. Likewise, Victoria Toensing. Both were raided by Joe Biden’s secret police, the NKFBI, last week.

Ditto Paul and Marilyn Hueper.

The Alaska couple were enjoying a little sleep-in on April 28, when “a dozen armed FBI agents kicked down their front door in an investigation associated with Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s stolen laptop.”

The agents, with guns drawn, handcuffed the couple and interrogated them for nearly three hours.

The Huepers, you see, had been in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 for the big Trump rally.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/our_country_was_founded_by_geniuses_but_its_being_run_by_idiots.html

The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back: “Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots.”  I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting.  

The principles behind the formation of America’s government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as hell.  This isn’t an extraordinary statement.  Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground.  

This phenomenon is apparent anywhere there is power. 

John O’Sullivan, a senior policy adviser for Prime Minister Thatcher, wrote a short essay thirty years ago that should have made freedom-minded conservatives rethink any lingering attachments to institutional authorities.   

He asked a question we often ask ourselves: how is it that almost all institutional bodies — whether governmental agencies or purportedly “nonpartisan” scientific academies or even religious groups and charities — transform over time into left-leaning entities?  In grappling with what might seem inexplicable, he corralled three insights about organizational behavior: (1) Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy asserting that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic their foundations, will come to be run by an elite group of people; (2) Robert Conquest’s Second Law stating that every organization behaves as if “headed by secret agents of its opponents”; and (3) O’Sullivan’s very own First Law positing that “[a]ll organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”  In other words, Michels tells us that the key to understanding any institution is its leadership, not its charter.  Conquest argues that the leadership will always have objectives at odds with the organization’s intended purpose, if for no other reason than that the leadership’s continued employment and future power paradoxically depend upon never completely succeeding.  And O’Sullivan takes this insight farther by noting that the type of person who staffs such organizations tends to disdain private profit and the historic composition of Western civilization’s free-market culture.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/federal-biden-inquisitors-lloyd-billingsley-0/

Last week, Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told lawmakers that James Hodgkinson “intended for the shooting to be his final act on Earth,” when he attacked Republican lawmakers on June 14, 2017, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise. According to Sanborn, Hodgkinson knew  “he would likely be killed,” a tacit acknowledgement that the FBI had indeed classified the attack as “suicide by cop,” not an act of terrorism.

“I am not aware of the rationale,” Sanborn told lawmakers. “I was not in my seat at the time, so I would have to get back to you on the specifics of what the rationale was.” In the seat of acting FBI director at the time was Andrew McCabe, a Clinton crony and major player in the Russia hoax. McCabe did not testify about the rationale for calling the attack suicide by cop. 

“If it were to happen today, we would open it as a domestic terrorism case,” Sanborn testified. DOJ assistant attorney general Brad Wiegmann told legislators that James Hodgkinson was a domestic terrorist, nearly four years after the FBI failed to do so. All told, it was quite a performance from the FBI-DOJ duo. 

Hodgkinson, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, carried a list of Republican lawmakers and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” Hodgkinson purchased an SKS rifle, a Russian or Chinese made precursor to the AK-47, and practiced his marksmanship. Hodgkinson also recorded a video of the field where Republican lawmakers played baseball. 

On June 14, 2017, as the Republicans practiced, Hodgkinson opened fire, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and Zack Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams. The Sanders supporter then engaged the Capitol Police in a gun battle, not what one would expect from someone out to commit suicide by cop. That absurd designation recalls an episode from the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-tim-scott-11620078729?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Kamala Harris went first. In the Republican response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott avowed that America “is not a racist country.” The next day on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the vice president was asked if she agreed with him.

“I don’t think America is a racist country,” she said, “but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”

The following day, it was President Biden’s turn. In an interview with NBC’s “Today,” he, too, was asked about Mr. Scott’s characterization—and he, too, agreed. “I don’t think America’s racist,” he said, “but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow [laws], and before that slavery, have had a cost, and we have to deal with it.”

Though no one was impolite enough to bring it up, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris would never have said what they did if the black Republican senator from South Carolina hadn’t used his moment to force their hands. Essentially, he dared them to speak aloud the logical conclusion from all their repeated references to systemic racism and the threat of white supremacy. Wisely recognizing that this would be political poison, they flinched.

How different from only two weeks ago, when a Columbus, Ohio, police officer saved the life of a black teenager by shooting another black teen about to stab her. Asked about it, White House press secretary Jen Psaki went right for the progressive go-to: “Black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.”

That’s the trouble with narratives. They are one size fits all, with no room for considering the individual case on its merits and particular circumstances. This is what Mr. Scott was referring to when he suggested race is used as “a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants”—by slamming anyone who raises an inconvenient fact as racist or dismissing speech as invalid based solely on the speaker’s racial identity.

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/america-courts-disaster-by-rewarding?token=eyJ

Is a country that rewards failure, corruption, and deceit destined to fail?

This disquieting question comes to mind when one considers how members of the commanding heights of society have increasingly failed—at least on merit—upward.

Some recent news items illustrate this point.

The Biden administration has seen a number of its nominees confirmed, with varying Republican support, in spite of their checkered records.

Samantha Power, the U.N. ambassador during the Obama administration, was found to have made several hundred seemingly unjustifiable unmasking requests—exposing the name of someone incidentally recorded by government surveillance—and apparently lied about one such series of requests, regarding retired Gen. Mike Flynn, in testimony to Congress. Her inglorious record spans from our shores to Israel, Syria, and well beyond the Levant.

Power was rewarded by being confirmed to head the U.S. Agency for International Development and is likely to be seated on the National Security Council.

Lisa Monaco, the former Obama administration homeland security adviser, played a critical role in word and deed in propagating Russiagate/Spygate. She was rewarded by being confirmed as deputy attorney general, where she is expected to take a major role in combating domestic violent extremism. There are indications that this effort could lead to the targeting of like-minded political dissenters to the ones wrongfully ensnared in Russiagate/Spygate.

Setting aside Biden administration nominees, word broke last week that Mary McCord, a former senior Obama Department of Justice official responsible for rubberstamping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications to spy on Carter Page, helping oversee the Crossfire Hurricane operation, and like Power, targeting Flynn, was named to the eight-member amici curiae of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Amicus curiae are responsible for advising the FISC on critical matters, including, ironically, legal arguments advancing the protection of civil liberties.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/05/bidens-massive-hidden-tax-hike-that-well-all-have-to-pay/

You’re about to get hit with a huge tax. No it’s not to pay for the new infrastructure bill or the Green New Deal, which will cost trillions of dollars in new taxes, though they do play a role. Nor does it come from paying for the trillions of COVID-19 “stimulus” packages that Congress has passed, even as the economy roared out of its recession late last year. No, this tax is far more insidious than all that.

It’s inflation. A tax that costs everyone dearly, rich and poor alike.

Americans have gotten used to having little or no inflation. They’ve forgotten how awful it is. Economically speaking, it’s the most devastating of all taxes, because it comes entirely from government. And citizens don’t realize they’re paying it until too late.

If you’re under 45, you might not understand. After all, more than 90% of your life has been spent with declining or even non-existent inflation. When you got a raise, your pay really went up. And when you went to the store to buy things, prices often were below where they were a year earlier.

But guess what? With a tidal wave of tax hikes and new spending from the Biden Democrats, a raft of new “green” federal regulations on the way, key global shortages of foodstuffs, a rising minimum wage, and tight markets for industrial goods such as lumber, steel and even microchips, not to mention a Fed that loves to print money, we may be on the verge of an inflation surge that could take down our financial markets and cut deeply into average Americans’ standard of living.

Wait until the ads finish….

https://www.aol.com/news/video-shows-stranger-attacking-asian-115308599.html

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/04/the_curious_case_of_the_asian_american_victim_774865.html

The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event – the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual temptation, in the form of massage parlors that he felt guilty patronizing.

But that’s not how the incident was treated by the Asian American commentariat. Instead, a consensus quickly formed among journalists, scholars, and cultural figures writing op-eds and giving broadcast interviews that the shooting represented a pervasive, historical victimization by Asian people at the hands of the white majority. It was almost as if shootings of Asian women by white gunmen were an everyday occurrence, rather than a singular, exceedingly rare event.

Bee Nguyen, the first Asian woman to be elected to the George state assembly, declared at a rally four days after the shooting that the incident requires us “to demand justice not only for these victims but for all victims of white supremacy.” The Asian-American Association of Massachusetts, a supposedly nonpartisan group established by the state legislature, issued a statement blaming the attack on “misogyny, white supremacy, and the historical portrayal of Asians as the ‘Yellow Peril.’”

The Korean American novelist R.O. Kwon wrote a “letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are breaking,” published in Vanity Fair, saying that the Atlanta murders represented “the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.”

Two days after the attack, the page one headline in The New York Times read, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” with the article quoting several women excoriating the Atlanta police for even thinking that the massage parlor shootings may not have been racially motivated. There were no views on the other side of the issue in the Times coverage. Similarly in a New York Times podcast, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong said, “We have also been victims to systemic racism throughout history,” except, she continued, “we have been conditioned to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

“I think that came from the white supremacist system that we live in,” she added.