RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-supreme-thuggery-of-democrats-court-packing-scheme/

The sponsors of this plan are gaslighting the nation with nonsensical explanations.

T hat settles it. Henceforth, for baseball, we need 13 on the field. You know, for “balance.” After all, when the big leagues started playing the World Series in 1903, there were only 16 teams. Now there are 30. If you’re going to have 30 teams, there should be at least 13 players on each side, right? Maybe even 30!

Okay, okay, it’s a stupid idea. But you’ll have to forgive me: I watched Thursday’s Rockin’ Jerry & the Wokes show on the steps of the Supreme Court, and ever since, I’ve felt much stupider.

According to Congressman Nadler (D., N.Y.) and his progressive posse, the high court must be expanded, from the nine-member body it has been for over 150 years to the 13-member tribunal they say we urgently need it to be, because there are now 13 federal circuit courts of appeal. There were only nine circuits when the Supreme Court was set at nine justices in 1869.

This is nonsense, but that is par for the course, because it is not meant to be taken seriously as an argument.

The Dems’ Court-expansion-and-packing project is not a public-policy proposal. It’s thuggery. That explains the zany rationales Nadler et al. offered for it at their presser. Maybe the number should be 13 because that’s how many times they said “racism” (though I could be low-balling here). Or maybe expanding the Court is infrastructure, or part of the existential climate crisis. Makes total sense. See, the less this has to do with logic, the more the justices will have it in the front of their minds that the Left is crazy enough to do anything at this point, so they’d better be careful how they decide these cases — and even about what cases they decide to decide.

The size of the Supreme Court has nothing to do with the number of circuits — no more than the size of the Ninth Circuit bench (29 judges) has to do with that of the First Circuit’s (nine judges), or than the geographic jurisdiction of the Eighth Circuit (seven states) has to do with that of the Federal Circuit (nationwide for limited categories of cases), or of the District of Columbia Circuit (just the city of Washington).

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/04/17/small_businesses_are_key_to_economic_recovery___145606.html

Alfredo Ortiz is the president and CEO of the Job Creators Network.

American small businesses are the key to unlock our national economic recovery. Small businesses account for two-thirds of all new jobs and drive much of the annual economic growth Americans take for granted. Given the ongoing economic and labor-market turmoil, small businesses are more important now than perhaps in any other time in American history. 

We have both seen firsthand how small businesses can help poor, minority, and immigrant Americans live the American Dream. We want all Americans – regardless of their background – to have the opportunity to follow in our footsteps by creating successful  businesses, especially now when they are so desperately needed.  

Unfortunately, small businesses are suffering. They were some of the most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions on activity. More than 100,000 small businesses closed permanently in 2020. By one estimate, more than 110,000 restaurants alone have shut their doors for good. In California, 40,000 small businesses have closed, with nearly half of those closures being permanent. Ordinary Americans can view this carnage with their own eyes walking down Main Street or driving past any suburban strip mall and seeing shops boarded up and bankrupt.  

Traditionally, America’s small business engine has been unbreakable, with new entrepreneurs constantly replenishing and growing the national stock. Yet bringing small businesses back this time may not be a given. With many of them barely keeping their doors open after a year of unprecedented turmoil, bad government policies like proposed tax increases and regulations threaten to put them out of business for good.  

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-victorians-had-to-accept-darwin

The death of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis necessitates a new mental habit among us enlightened American souls.

We embrace assorted cognitive exercises as people with access to higher wisdom, such as understanding that a disadvantaged background can make it harder to excel, or that subtle bias can infect our thinking and actions.

Okay, but we need another one.

Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves “Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?”

Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.

This is why so many can only bristle at the idea that George Floyd did not die because he was black.

It’s why now, when the cop who killed Daunte Wright not only says she mistook her gun for a taser, and is even recorded as having done so, legions of people still insist on parsing it as evidence of “racism.” The idea is, I suppose, that she wouldn’t have made that mistake, would have been more prudent, if Daunte Wright was instead a white guy named Donald White.

* * *

Here is why we need that mental exercise. Tony Timpa was quite white and was killed quite in the way that Floyd was, including it being recorded.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17288/social-media-apogee

Most famously, of course, is the banning of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But there are many, many others.

Journalist friends from center-right outlets saw tens of thousands evaporate. Colleagues were suspended for reposting something they had said on multiple occasions for a year.

The social media giants are still flush with cash, convinced they are righteous and enlightened, and, most of all, are exceedingly arrogant. They believe they will continue to define and influence society – and they may – but only half.

The nearly consistent claim from established social media companies against their start-up competitors is that they are guilty of some “ism.” Take your pick: racial, ethnic, political, religious, sexual, whatever. Some crime, syndrome, or deplorable belief – some “ism” – is usually attached to any platform other than themselves.

This is not the stuff of right-wing conspiracy theorists. It touches on press freedoms and landmark legal cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan. In that 1964 case, the Supreme Court established that a plaintiff in a defamation case concerning a public figure must prove “actual malice” in reporting false information. Actual malice is the publication of a false statement with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.

When a business turns on roughly half of its customers, treats them like criminal suspects or seeks to deprive them of their services, can they prosper? The answer is “No.”

Social media is dying, they just don’t know it yet. All the so-called “giants” of Silicon Valley: Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk cannot continue successfully “as is.” In the lead-up to the 2020 election, and certainly in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot, persons and organizations not subscribing to the new orthodox socialist ideology of the American Left have found themselves “de-platformed,” suspended, erased, minimized and banned.

Most famously, of course, is the banning of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But there are many, many others. A policy analyst colleague with a few hundred Twitter followers watched an unexplained and precipitous 20% reduction overnight. They had not posted anything “controversial,” or anything at all in several weeks, but clearly some algorithm had identified the analyst as “one of those people.” Journalist friends from center-right outlets saw tens of thousands evaporate. Colleagues were suspended for reposting something they had said on multiple occasions for a year. No explanations, no remedy, no recourse. Another symptom of the cancel culture syndrome.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/16/on-the-backs-of-poor-whites/

The country is fast descending into a Dantean hell. 

The circles of hell into which we’ve been signed, sealed, and delivered are mass migration, diversity, multiculturalism, and zealous, institutionalized anti-whiteness, with its attendant de-civilization and inversion of long-held societal morals and mores.

The guiding ghost of Virgil is nowhere to be found. To ostensibly shepherd us out of hell, however, assorted serpents have slithered forth. 

Beware! All the more so when they speak to you from bastions of the establishment—Newsweek is one—as J. D. Vance does in, “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.” 

His is the typically conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from the gilded elite, regarding America’s promiscuous immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Vance is the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which is a culturally compliant—namely, unflattering—account of poor, white America. 

Provided your thesis allows for a cozy convergence of agreeable storylines—you are well-positioned to peddle a national bestseller to the approving Left, libertarian, neoconservative, and pseudo-conservative smart set.

Yes, Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medias-racial-narrative-targets-whites-harms-blacks-11618597161?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Woodson is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.”

Are only white people capable of hate crimes? If you get all your news from mainstream media sources, that’s what you’d think. A 51-year-old black man allegedly stabbing a 12-year-old white boy in Pittsburgh while shouting racial epithets barely made national news. The same was true when a black man was arrested for savagely beating a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown Manhattan. We saw endless coverage of the despicable assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, but when a 25-year-old black male allegedly killed a Capitol police officer last week, MSNBC erroneously reported the suspect was white.

Throughout 2020 there was a rise in violence against Asian-Americans, but the race of the perpetrators was typically mentioned only when they were white. Media and other elites obsessively push the narrative that the greatest threat in this country is coming from “white supremacists.” This gross oversimplification has dire consequences for the most vulnerable in our society—those living in the poorest neighborhoods—and for the nation as a whole.

A media environment in which the only acceptable villains are white creates a more dangerous world for all of us. The rush to judgment based on skin color is familiar to those of us who lived through segregation. In those days, some in law enforcement couldn’t care less about crimes committed by blacks against other blacks, but there were severe penalties for offenses against whites. We marched and demanded fair and equal treatment under the law. As far as the application of criminal law, much of what is happening today is a retreat to the pre-Civil Rights South.

Every tragic police killing of a black person is amplified by radical progressives to accuse police of white supremacy and to push for defunding and anarchy. The more law-enforcement officers we lose to defunding, early retirements and drastic drops in recruitment, the fewer we have to patrol lower-income neighborhoods.

Mark Bauerlein is an emeritus professor of English at Emory University.

Given the irked and fearful state of the liberal temper at the present time, many people might find it hard to believe that liberalism used to be fun.

During the four years of President Donald Trump, liberals were miserable, sinking ever further into resentment and incredulity, a sense of history and America robbing them of their rightful place in control of the country. Unfortunately, the ascent of Joe Biden hasn’t much improved the mood, either. They have to spend too much time pretending that the bumbling mediocrity who now occupies the White House has statesmanlike stature for them to feel comfortable and secure.

Go back to the ’90s, however, and a whole different attitude ran through the liberal ranks. Do you remember? The Reagan-Bush Era was over, Bill Clinton was popular, and Newt Gingrich’s Congress had some off-putting characters who signified to liberals that the last gasp of conservatism was at hand. The left could be an irritant, yes, but trouble-makers such as Al Sharpton had but a minor influence on national affairs and required only the occasional appeasement to be kept in check. Meanwhile, NAFTA and other globalist moves promised even greater prosperity, and the Internet, too, seemed just the kind of instrument of individual expression and universal access that tallied the liberal dream of empowerment and equity.

It gave liberals daily confirmation of … themselves. They saw that the world was moving in a liberalizing direction, and they knew that it was good. How could they not congratulate themselves when all of this ’90s advent came on top of a long historical advance that set liberals up on a solid moral pedestal forever (so they believed)? Apart from the Reagan interruption, they could look back at a half-century of righteous progress that gave no credit to their opponents. Liberals could claim as their own the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-War protests, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, and the steady diversification of the U.S. population, all of them virtuous and overdue crusades that ennobled the ones who led them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-cdc-shouldnt-treat-racism-as-a-public-health-crisis/

For COVID-19, the numbers don’t bear out the assumption, which distracts from the agency’s core mission.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, with a simple goal: prevent the spread of malaria. The mission soon expanded to all communicable diseases and, more recently, to areas — such as domestic violence, gun control, and vaping — that, while related to health, seem far afield from the agency’s primary purpose. Today the CDC describes its mission as protecting the nation from health threats both foreign and domestic. Now the agency appears to have expanded its mandate into progressive politics.

In a recent statement, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserts that there have been disproportionate numbers of COVD-19 cases and deaths in communities of color. She claims that the disparities were the result not of COVID-19 but rather of racism, which she labels a public-health crisis. Her statement echoes an American Medical Association policy recognizing racism as a public-health threat and similar declarations from 194 state and local government entities.

But the director’s statement is inconsistent with the CDC’s current data that show little or no increased incidence of black COVID-19 deaths. At best it reflects outdated data documenting disparities that no longer exist. At worst, it reflects a political agenda in search of a justification. Whichever it is, it suggests that public-health officials, in this case the CDC, have become distracted from their core job.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/where_have_you_gone_atticus_finch.html

In the archives of legal fiction, two characters best embody historic liberal self-perception. One is attorney Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. The other is Juror #8 in the 1957 film, 12 Angry Men. Today, each is an endangered species.

In his defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, Atticus ignored public opinion. He stared down the mobs intent on extra-legal justice and protected his ”mockingbird” as best he could. The unlikely mockingbird today is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. As Chauvin learned quickly, if he did not know it beforehand, today’s vestigial liberals identify not with Atticus but with the mob.

Hell, as even Snopes had to concede Vice President Kamala Harris “encouraged her supporters to donate” to a nonprofit called the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) that was bailing out members of the mob arrested for rioting after George Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s crime, like Robinson’s, was being of a certain race in a society that increasingly sees justice only through the prism of race. Like the fictional Robinson, the real-life Chauvin represents one of a long and growing line of sacrificial lambs offered on the altar of racial “justice” to expiate the nation’s imagined sins.

Ever impatient, the mobs from the very same liberal metro could not wait for Chauvin’s official immolation to demand the sacrifice of a new lamb. This time, the mobs have shown no scruple about sating themselves on a female officer. To them, it mattered not a whit that veteran Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, officer Kim Potter clearly showed no racial malice in her accidental shooting of Duante Wright, a troubled archetype from a subculture slowly being crushed under the weight of rigidly enforced dishonesty.

To his good fortune, Chauvin has found his Atticus in defense attorney Eric Nelson. Although he has backstage help from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Nelson has been arguing solo against the snarky Mod Squad of a prosecution team. Calm and dispassionate, the forty-something Nelson has been quietly picking the prosecution case apart these last three weeks.  Viewed from another planet, the unknowing alien might wonder why Chauvin is even on trial. For details, please see the work done by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection.  Those who have not followed the case closely would be wise to ignore Big Media and watch the closing arguments, likely on Monday, before forming an opinion.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/15/biden-intelligence-community-breaches-authority-to-target-the-right/

Instead of prioritizing resources to confront the menace posed by America’s foreign adversaries the IC is devoting most of its time to pursuing Americans on the political Right.

The freshly reelected Republican senator from Nebraska had kind words this week for Joe Biden’s intelligence chiefs. “The American people are blessed to have an [intelligence community] as serious as ours,” Senator Ben Sasse said during Wednesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. He called the group, which included FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director William Burns, “heroes” and wanted a chance to “say thank you” in front of the American people.

Sasse, who is supposed to act as a fierce skeptic not a fawning cheerleader of the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus, singled out Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for praise. “Your opening statement . . . was incredibly strong,” Sasse swooned. 

Haines, the top deputy to former CIA Director John Brennan during the Obama Administration, undoubtedly marveled at winning such a groveling endorsement from a sitting Republican senator—or perhaps she internally laughed at winning over yet another reliable GOP dupe. (In fairness, most Republicans on the committee joined in Sasse’s praise for Haines.)

But Senate Republicans should have been outraged rather than starry-eyed over Haines’ opening statement as well as her conduct in office since taking the reins of the intelligence community the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Haines is wasting no time accelerating the weaponization of a sprawling organization that is supposed to identify threats to the homeland by foreign actors, not target Americans with the wrong political views.